Gremlin.

Truly unfathomable.

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"If one desires to start the day with the clearest and most concise compilation of critically important news, read News Items." — Scott Andrews, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Virginia Retirement System.

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1. Tomorrow, 26 February, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying an Intuitive Machines mission that will stay on the surface of the moon for approximately three weeks before returning to Earth. Among other things, the Intuitive Machines lander contains a mini data center, massing just 1 kilogram and containing 8 terabytes of SSD storage. This belongs to Lonestar Data Holdings and is part of a proof-of-concept mission meant to bring moon-based data centers closer to reality. The idea of putting a data center on the moon raises a natural question: Why? Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards. “Data centers, right? They’re like modern cathedrals. We’re building these things, they run our entire civilization. It’s superb, and yet you realize that the networks connecting them are increasingly fragile.” (Source: spectrum.ieee.org)

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2. Meta Platforms is in talks to build a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence endeavors that would dwarf anything the company has done to date and would be among the biggest of its kind, according to two people who have spoken to Meta executives about it. Based on the number of chips and the amount of power the company is discussing for the campus, it could cost more than $200 billion, one of these people said. Meta’s proposed new data center campus, which hasn’t previously been reported, would be several times larger than a new AI data center in Louisiana that CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed last month, which he implied would be about four miles long. (Source: theinformation.com, italics mine)

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