this made it into the WSJ lol

the work dinner situation is out of hand congress needs to pass some common-sense reforms: - cocktail “hour” no longer than 45m - seated for dinner by 6:30 - just serve the goddamn apps all at once - maximum 10 min gap between courses - dessert hits table by 8pm LATEST

ok, hear me out: we should build a ton of AI data center capacity in northern Alaska I think about this a weird amount, because I’ve actually spent time there for work (I believe I hold the record for northern-most deployment in Palantir history?) Prudhoe Bay sits on the very northern coast of Alaska, and was once the largest oil field in America. It still pumps 180k barrels of crude oil per day from over 800 wells, with 2k people working up there. It also produces 8 billion cubic ft of natural gas/day. While in most oil fields it’d be exported and sold, in Alaska natural gas is re-injected back into the reservoir because it can’t be transported – pipeline is crude-only, and ships can't get up there with the ice. The “Alaska LNG” project to build an 800mi pipeline to south has been talked about for years, but would cost like $50b and wouldn’t be economically competitive with the Permian. So, there’s 40 trillion cubic ft of proven natural gas reserves – enough to create 25GW of power, continuously, for 30 years! And it’s just sitting there, trapped, fully accessible in a pre-drilled reservoir, with wells, pumps, separation facilities, gas storage, ice roads, an airport, lodging, etc. There’s already expertise on how to build and operate infrastructure, and a built-in workforce. Just drop some turbines in and you have as much on-demand electricity as you’d ever need – completely separated from L48 grid. I'm not an expert in data center cooling, but I would also assume that it would be a pretty efficient place to put these things - it certainly never gets too hot! Of course a natural reaction to this might be that building data centers would somehow despoil the pristine landscape, but the footprint and impact would be extremely slight compared to the massive amount of oil and gas infrastructure already up there (much less what would be required for LNG export). Also, having been there, I can tell you that it basically looks like the moon - it's just flat, white tundra for miles and miles around. You'd be disrupting much less wildlife there than you would almost anywhere else in the U.S. that you would build this stuff. And, unlike basically everywhere else they’re trying to build data centers, you’re not in anyone’s “backyard” – most of the people up there are oil workers anyway, and the full-time Slope population lives away from the oil fields. There's some random smattering of projects being talked about (like 1-3GW theoretical, total) but I don't think we're talking about this nearly enough? Is there some reason this isn't like, the backbone of our national AI strategy, assuming we have to build these somewhere? @elonmusk get in on this man