SoftBank's Son Pitches $1 Trillion Arizona AI Hub (reuters.com) 30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son is envisaging setting up a $1 trillion industrial complex in Arizona that will build robots and artificial intelligence, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Son is seeking to team up with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co for the project, which is aimed at bringing back high-end tech manufacturing to the U.S. and to create a version of China's vast manufacturing hub of Shenzhen, the report said.
SoftBank officials have spoken with U.S. federal and state government officials to discuss possible tax breaks for companies building factories or otherwise investing in the industrial park, including talks with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the report said. SoftBank is keen to have TSMC involved in the project, codenamed Project Crystal Land, but it is not clear in what capacity, the report said. It is also not clear the Taiwanese company would be interested, it said. TSMC is already building chipmaking factories in the U.S. with a planned investment of $165 billion. Son is also sounding out interest among tech companies including Samsung Electronics, the report said.
The plans are preliminary and feasibility depends on support from the Trump administration and state officials, it said. A commitment of $1 trillion would be double that of the $500 billion "Stargate" project which seeks to build out data centre capacity across the U.S., with funding from SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.
SoftBank officials have spoken with U.S. federal and state government officials to discuss possible tax breaks for companies building factories or otherwise investing in the industrial park, including talks with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the report said. SoftBank is keen to have TSMC involved in the project, codenamed Project Crystal Land, but it is not clear in what capacity, the report said. It is also not clear the Taiwanese company would be interested, it said. TSMC is already building chipmaking factories in the U.S. with a planned investment of $165 billion. Son is also sounding out interest among tech companies including Samsung Electronics, the report said.
The plans are preliminary and feasibility depends on support from the Trump administration and state officials, it said. A commitment of $1 trillion would be double that of the $500 billion "Stargate" project which seeks to build out data centre capacity across the U.S., with funding from SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle.
Softbank is a scam (Score:4, Insightful)
Always was, always will be.
The headline should be "Son looking for people to buy into his new Ponzi setup".
Its all a scam (Score:1)
SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son is envisaging setting up a $1 trillion industrial complex in Arizona that will build robots and artificial intelligence
(a) Masayoshi Son is an idiot who has made many bad investments. I don't know how he got rich, but it sure wasn't by being smart.
(b) Companies just LOVE to make big announcements. They just love it. The bigger, the better. They have no intention of actually doing any of these Gazillion Dollar Projects, they just like to announce them, because it gives the appearance that they are actually doing something and maybe it will make their stock price go up a little bit.
Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:4, Insightful)
So sure let's find a desert where water is scarce and build giant data centers for replacing white collar workers.
It really pisses me off the water and electricity I need to live are going to be taken away from me so that I can also lose my job. And the bastards are going to get away with it too because we are stupid and we're going to let them do it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
It uses about a bottle of water. I don't know how true that is but you can bet it uses a hell of a lot of water. Yes of course it's not necessary for it to use and dispose of water but it is much cheaper than having the more expensive recirculating systems.
Given where it will be located, I would insist on the contract requiring closed-loop cooling or ground-loop cooling. Also, I would specify they can only source 50% of their power from the local grid and must get the other 50% from newly constructed renewables. Their entire complex should be covered in solar panels, along with their entire parking area. No subsidized energy to hallucinate with.
Re:Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:4, Informative)
Using water for cooling doesn't "use it up". The warm water is still available for other uses, such as irrigation. Evaporative losses are not significant.
Compared to agricultural irrigation, these other water uses are minimal and create far more jobs.
A bigger environmental impact will be the residential water used by the employees drawn to the area, mostly for watering their lawns. Xeriscaping can help here.
TSMC is already having trouble recruiting skilled tech workers in Arizona. Softbank will have the same problem.
Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:4, Insightful)
The talent pool should be pretty much as good as anywhere, except possibly Taiwan itself. There are already a lot of semiconductor fabs in Arizona, especially the Phoenix area, which means basically every other generation of lithography somebody is building their most advanced fab there. There are also already a lot of data centers in Phoenix. Even big providers like azure and aws have large hubs there.
Most people I've spoken to say Phoenix is a preferred site for fabs is because the ground is very still, mostly hard caliche over granite bedrock and nowhere near a fault line. No natural disasters to speak of either. The power grid is also highly reliable, probably the most reliable in the US, and in many places you even have grid redundancy in addition to municipal natural gas to fuel a generator.
It's hard to beat if you value high yields.
And for datacenters, we're also powered by the largest nuclear plant in the US and have lower electricity rates than most of the country. Besides that, the low rate of fog, overcast, and severe weather makes solar quite ideal to save even more on power.
Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:3)
Or the water could be provided to the few humans left who are willing to drive the robots to work.
Wait, what now...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:2)
Actually it snows in most of Arizona. The hottest region is Phoenix, which has never reached 130. You're probably thinking of death valley, which is in California.
Correction (Score:2)
In practice that just means you have less water.
I don't know if you've been following the news but Arizona already doesn't have enough water for lawns. They aren't far off from rationing showers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:2)
It really pisses me off the water and electricity I need to live are going to be taken away from me so that I can also lose my job. And the bastards are going to get away with it too because we are stupid and we're going to let them do it.
- Desert biome doesn't mean water is scarce
- You don't know anything about Arizona
- Arizona doesn't belong to you, and neither do its resources
- Water is scarce primarily in Maricopa county.
- Drive just over an hour north of Maricopa county and you end up in a ski resort town. Drive just over an hour east of Maricopa county and you end up in bear country, complete with evergreens.
- Water management matters a lot more than water usage.
- Maricopa county has never needed to resort to water rationing or usage l
Re: (Score:2)
I have heard this before and I am not sure what it means when AI uses a bottle of water. Humans can't drink it afterwards? Or use it for farming or flushing toilets?
Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:2)
Let's say a query uses 3000 watts for 10 seconds. That's probably within an order of magnitude because a 300w consumer GPU can do quite a lot in 10s, but the bigger models will be using a bit more hardware.
If every bit of that 0.00833 kWh of that went into boiling some water, you could vaporize about 13 grams or about 1/40th of a bottle of water.
We then need to consider that the data center cooling system will add about 1/3 more, and that to produce
Re: Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score:1)
Evaporative cooling. The water is lost to the atmosphere. The total power budget for your query includes a percentage of the energy it took to train the model. Just serving your query isn't all that expensive, but the training time is.
Arizona? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why Arizona? Why pick a state that is so overheated and water deprived? Seriously, they are already fighting over water there and you want want a ton of water to do semiconductor manufacturing?
Re:Arizona? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Arizona?
1. A favorable business climate.
2. Skilled workforce, specifically in semiconductors
3. Low humidity
4. Stable geology. No earthquakes. No hurricanes. No blizzards.
5. Stable utilities. No power blackouts.
6. Located close to labor in Mexico for packaging. Direct flights to Asia.
7. Decent universities
8. An attractive location for new employees to relocate to. Arizona is a nice place to live with affordable housing.
Re: (Score:3)
3. Low humidity
Wildly undervalued if you don't know much about highly technical work. As someone that tried to manage humidity in a non-semiconductor lab to within the tolerances of the machines in the building, it's a fucking nightmare if the outside climate is humid. You run into issues like if you run too much air through the dehumidifier setup it makes drafts that fuck up the scales. Substantially easier to add water to the air IMO.
A very dry climate is kind of like having a natural vacuum... yeah you can manufacture
Re: (Score:2)
Does "Stable utilities" include water?
What trillion dollars? (Score:4, Insightful)
Setting aside for the moment how this is an obviously stupid and harmful idea, how does this guy have any money at all and why does anyone listen to him about what to do with it after his bank spent several years shredding cash for clearly idiotic blitzscaling scams?
Re: (Score:2)
A billion dollars alone is still just such a staggering amount of money relative to needs and once you have it it's really more difficult to lose it then one would think especially in the case of tech folks who have massive amounts of stock wealth that they can just leverage for bank money rather than actually use their money.
As for why people listen (other wealthy people) it's self fulfilling, you have money therefore you you must know what you're doing, otherwise why would you have the money?
Re:What trillion dollars? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
That's probably true but what I think is needed is not just the businesses but the individuals making these decisions need to feel consequences and lose some money which rarely happens.
Can we get all the con men into the frame, please? (Score:2)
Re: Interesting (Score:3)
"Robots and AI"? (Score:3)
1970 called and wants its hallucinations back.
Yes, _industrial_ robots are a business. Sort of. Apparently it is a business bad enough that it cannot be run profitably in Europe and hence China does it now. Humanoid robots? That is just stupid people thinking stupid things. These cannot be made safe at this time or the foreseeable future, unless you make them so weak they become useless. So, novelty maybe, real business? No chance in hell.
And AI? For that you do not need a "hub". LLMs are mostly useless anyawys and other forms of AI are already made by numerous companies in numerous places.