Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A good bubble leaves something lasting
Fiber from the last bubble
Google built its business on dark fiber, which was basically free after the dot-com era. It had the killer search engine, and much of its power comes from all the dark fiber it bought up. The core internet still runs on WorldCom fiber.
Power as the legacy
GPUs don't last that long. Data centers last a while, but what AI will leave behind is power. If this all blows up and there is way too much power, that is an amazing world to be in. Energy undergirds everything, and humanity has always been energy constrained. It's hard to even imagine a world of energy abundance.
Power arrived faster
The US has brought a lot more power online than expected, through behind-the-meter generation that has since been replicated, natural gas in West Texas, and even restarted nuclear plants. Power has taken longer to become a constraint than anyone expected, and that gives Amazon more time to make Trainium better and Google more time to make TPUs competitive on efficiency.
Why did dark fiber become so cheap?
Telecom companies in the late 1990s laid far more fiber than traffic required, and much of it was never lit. When the bubble burst in 2001 and 2002, firms like WorldCom collapsed and their networks were sold for a fraction of what they cost to build. Buyers who picked up that capacity got years of cheap bandwidth.
How does behind-the-meter generation work?
A power plant is built on site and connected directly to a data center, so the electricity never travels through the public grid. That avoids the wait for a grid connection. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that projects waiting for grid interconnection spend about five years in the queue.
Why do GPUs age faster than fiber?
New generations of data center GPUs have arrived roughly every one to two years, and the older chips fall behind in speed and efficiency. They also run hot and wear under constant load. A glass fiber can stay in service for decades, with only the equipment at each end being replaced.
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