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MJ Horowitz

MJ Horowitz

A dinosaur from Beowulf times.

How Many Costcos Does It Take to Run the Internet?

How Many Costcos Does It Take to Run the Internet?

Introducing the CUPS Metric: Costco Units of Processing Space Just over a decade ago we described compute capability for the non-technical by how many iPhones strung together would equal a petaflop of supercomputing power. Today we make our noble comparisons to warehouse-scale bulk shopping meccas. But let’s actually talk

Colossus in the Cottonfield

Colossus in the Cottonfield

Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer arrives in Memphis—uninvited, unpermitted, and unfiltered In South Memphis, where the air already carries the weight of decades of industrial residue, Elon Musk's xAI has erected its latest marvel: Colossus, a supercomputer powered by 35 methane gas turbines. These turbines, operating without

When the Datacenter Is Too Loud for the Neighborhood

When the Datacenter Is Too Loud for the Neighborhood

Brainerd’s new ordinance shows what happens when infrastructure meets local fear They say data has no borders, but fans do. Fans have decibels. Fans have bearings that rattle after a few months of spinning at full tilt. And in Brainerd, Minnesota, the people have heard enough. This isn’t

The Datacenter May Soon Be Held Together by Light

The Datacenter May Soon Be Held Together by Light

Inside the strange, silent future of terahertz wireless infrastructure There’s a thing that happens in aging datacenters—not always visible, but felt. You open the floor tile, expecting clean airflow, and instead find a bundled, brittle, half-labeled horror of fiber and copper, snaking in knots like something alive and

Your Datacenter Might Be the Grid’s Secret Weapon

Your Datacenter Might Be the Grid’s Secret Weapon

What if stabilizing the power grid wasn’t about adding capacity—but making what we already have smarter? There’s a quiet, almost subversive idea buried in a dense paper from the energy systems world: Datacenters—the very things being blamed for devouring the modern grid—might also be the

The AI Models Are Getting Smarter. Your Datacenter Probably Isn’t.

The AI Models Are Getting Smarter. Your Datacenter Probably Isn’t.

Why the next frontier in compute might leave your infrastructure behind In the beginning, there was brute force. You fed the GPUs data—any data, all data—and they ground it into insight with raw, burn-the-planet math. Bigger models meant bigger training runs meant bigger clusters. And the datacenter, that