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When Mark Zuckerberg announced on July 14 that his company Meta was embarking on a project to build massively power-hungry data centers to support its ambitions for advancing artificial intelligence, the imagery that accompanied his posts on Facebook and Threads was stark. The data centers he was announcing would have power requirements upwards of five gigawatts and, to show just how big that would be, Zuckerberg’s post included a visual of a gigantic rectilinear block covering a sizable portion of Manhattan. It was as if the city were suddenly snuffed out by millions of square feet of artificial intelligence infrastructure. A detail that was not included in Zuckerberg’s initial announcement was the curious way these massive data centers are currently being built. In an interview with the Information, Zuckerberg briefly explained that part of the way Meta is building out its multi-gigawatt data centers is by using quickly constructed hurricane-proof tents. “We have a very strong infrastructure team that is doing novel work to build up data centers,” Zuckerberg said. “I wanted them to not just take four years to build these concrete buildings, so we pioneered this new method where we’re basically building these weatherproof tents and building up the networks and the GPU clusters inside them in order to build them faster.” A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Fast Company that tents are currently being set up as part of at least one of the multi-gigawatt data centers the company is building, located in New Albany, Ohio. Dubbed “rapid deployment structures,” the tents are long rectangular buildings made of puncture- and water-proof fabric supported by an aluminum substructure with a mushroom-esque pitched roof. The Ohio data center, which Meta has named Prometheus, is an already existing complex that is having additional computing capacity added through these server tents. Meta expects the facility to be big enough to draw more than one gigawatt of power by 2026. It is one of the worlds largest AI training clusters, according to the AI and semiconductor research company SemiAnalysis. The rapidly built tent structures there are part of the way Meta aims to meet its gigawatt goal next year. Tents may be part of another multi-gigawatt data center Meta is building in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Named Hyperion, it’s anticipated to pull two gigawatts of power by 2030, with the potential to grow to five gigawatts. Meta’s spokesperson says construction has been underway in Louisiana for months. The data center being built there will encompass 11 buildings adding up to more than four million square feet. The site covers roughly three square miles, so there’s plenty of space to expand. But even at capacity, it’s far less than the 22 square miles of land that makes up Manhattan. How much of this space will be initially made up of tents remains to be seen. But as the arms race and talent competition heat up between AI-focused companies like Meta, OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft, the size of these tents may be less important than how quickly they can be constructed. “I’m very excited about building them in an innovative way,” Zuckerberg said.
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E-Commerce
The U.S. auto safety agency is shedding more than 25% of its employees under financial incentive programs to depart the government offered by the Trump administration, according to data provided to Congress seen by Reuters. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department, is shrinking from 772 employees as of May 31 to 555 under the program. The Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration are also both losing more than 25% of their staff. Representative Rick Larsen, top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed concerns about the cuts, questioning how USDOT can “expedite project delivery and advance safety with a decimated workforce.” Overall, USDOT is losing just over 4,100 employees dropping from nearly 57,000 to 52,862, with the Federal Aviation Administration shedding 2,137 and falling from about 46,250 to 44,208. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Wednesday that the department did not cut any safety-critical employees and is actively seeking to add air traffic controllers. USDOT and NHTSA did not immediately comment. It is unclear if the Transportation Department still plans to conduct a layoff program on top of the early retirement departures. NHTSA has a number of ongoing investigations into advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles involving Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo and other companies. Consumer advocacy groups on Thursday urged lawmakers to drop proposed cuts to NHTSA’s budget, including cutting its operations and research account by over $10 million “harming the agencys ability to conduct rulemaking, enforcement actions, and research and analysis.” It would also cut nearly $78 million of supplemental funds from the $1 billion 2021 infrastructure law. Groups said they were “particularly concerned that such funding cuts may lead to further firings or forced retirements, which have decimated NHTSA.” David Shepardson, Reuters
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E-Commerce
Holders of the digital tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, one of the crypto ventures of the family of Donald Trump, voted on Wednesday to make them tradable, paving the way for their wide sale and purchase potentially boosting the value of the president’s holdings of them. The World Liberty tokens, known as $WLFI, were sold to investors after the Trump family and their partners launched the venture – a “decentralised finance” platform that has also issued a stablecoin – last autumn. The tokens were not made tradeable at their initial sale. Instead, they gave holders a right to vote on some changes to the business, such as its underlying code. Early investors have said the primary draw of $WLFI was the connection to Trump and, in turn, their expectations the tokens would grow in value due to his backing. Making the tokens tradable would see investors determine their price, enabling speculation, earning trading fees for exchanges that list them and likely stoking interest from a wider swath of crypto investors. The extent to which the Trump family, which reaps three-quarters of revenues from the initial sales of the tokens, will benefit from their wider trading is not clear. Gains in the tokens’ price would, however, swell the value of the family’s token holdings, the exact level of which is unclear. World Liberty and Trump’s other crypto businesses have faced criticism from Democratic lawmakers and ethics experts as the president’s administration reshapes regulations in the booming crypto sector. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic Representative Maxine Waters sent a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year in which they said, “The Trump family’s financial stake in World Liberty Financial represents an unprecedented conflict of interest with the potential to influence the Trump Administration’s oversightor lack thereofof the cryptocurrency industry.” The World Liberty tokens have not been designated as securities by the SEC, meaning they are not subject to the same scrutiny as investments like stocks. The White House has said Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children and that there are no conflicts of interest. The White House has not released the details of the trust arrangement. The Trump family business has been placed into a trust whose sole beneficiary is the president, meaning that the hundreds of millions of dollars from crypto deals struck while Trump is in office could hypothetically be withdrawn at any time, or at the latest, be at his disposal when he leaves office in less than four years. Trump’s company, DT Marks DEFI LLC, was set to receive 22.5 billion out of a total 100 billion $WLFI tokens, according to a description of the project released in October. The president held 15.75 billion of the tokens at the end of last year, according to a public financial disclosure report published last month. The Trump family has made around $500 million from World Liberty since the platform was launched, according to Reuters calculations based on the company’s terms and conditions, transactions traced by crypto analysis firms and publicly-disclosed deals. Asked by Reuters how the vote would impact the value of $WLFI tokens held by Trump and his family, the White House press office said: “This is not an inquiry for the White House.” The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment. In response to Reuters’ questions about how the tokens will become tradable, a World Liberty spokesperson said: “Additional details are forthcoming.” The venture says on its website that making $WLFI tradeable “brings us one step closer to building a more open, transparent, and powerful financial system.” “The American public should be very concerned about the president’s vested interests in the cryptocurrency market,” said Chris Swartz, a former longtime attorney at the U.S. government’s Office of Government Ethics, including under both Trump administrations, who now serves as senior ethics counsel for Democracy Defenders Action, a legal advocacy group. “Not only is it a potential conduit for foreign emoluments and other illicit payments, but it puts the president in competition against other cryptocurrency issuers at the same time he is advocating for digital asset marketplace legislation. That is a clear conflict of interest.” 99.9% support The World Liberty proposal to “formally initiate the tradability of the token,” posted on its website on July 9, was approved by 99.94% of around 20,900 votes. Some voters cited expectations of price gains or support for Trump as reasons for their choice. “We invested to get rich,” one wrote on the World Liberty website. “To make america great again,” wrote another. The identities of nearly all holders are hidden behind wallet addresses. A Milan-based person using the name Paolo, who declined to give his full name, told Reuters he had bought 95,000 $WLFI tokens for about $5,000. $WLFI tokens were sold in two initial tranches at $0.015 and $0.05. Paolo said he voted in favour of making the tokens tradeable and planned to hold the tokens until they reach $12. “Then I try to buy more when the price drops,” he said. The World Liberty proposal said the timing for making the tokens tradeable, and the eligibility requirements, would be determined at a later, unspecified date. Tokens held by World Liberty’s founders, team and advisers would not be initially “unlocked” for trading and would be subject to a longer “unlock schedule,” it said. The implementation of approved proposals would “occur within a reasonable time from the passage of the applicable proposal, according to the project description from October. Tom Wilson, Reuters
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E-Commerce
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