Friday December 27th 2024, Koh Tao, Thailand

First rainy day in Koh Tao, and first rainy day of the trip since Tskaltubo, Georgia! The rain makes you slow down and reflect on important things in life. This afternoon Zach and I spent time researching AI, energy, and the semiconductor industry. Zach brought up a good point that we have not talked about technology all trip. We have given ourself the space and time to think outside of what we were trained in through university and jobs, but now it is time to come back reinvigorated. If there was ever a clear market trend and wave of money flowing into an industry it is AI. There is not a single investor or futurist who is not onboard with the AI tsunami coming. With that being said, is there a way to make money from this tidal wave without working for a startup and selling your soul? We spitballed some interesting ideas. I spent some time learning about hydrogen fuel cells, high bandwidth memory chips, and networking subsystems. The state of the art data center being built by xAI requires 150 MW of power to run 100,000 GPUS and are scaling up. To put that into perspective, the average US home consumes about 1.2 kW. Therefore, the amount of power to run a data center could power about 125,000 US homes in a year! To power these data centers many companies are looking at building small modular nuclear reactors and hydrogen fuel cells. I have always been a fan of nuclear energy since learning the physics behind it in high school. There is a lot of innovation and engineering improvements to be had in this field and I am excited to follow it along. The last subtopic I want to comment on is that of networking in AI data centers. In the data centers you need fast, efficient, and low energy ways to move the data around. As AI scales, more and more data needs to be moved around the data center servers, and externally out of the data center in the fastest manner possible. In university I found a passion for photonics, the study of light. The datacenter today currently use 400 Gigabit/s ethernet protocol over fiber optic cable, but plan to scale to 800 and beyond. This can interestingly be achieved through advancements in silicon photonics. I could go on but I think that is enough for the tech talk. In the afternoon it stopped raining and Zach and I went to a latin party on the beach. I really enjoy latin culture and hope to make it to South America at the end of my trip to become really fluent in Spanish. I practiced my Spanish with Argentinians, Chileans, and spaniards. I actually got a compliment my Spanish is good! Argentina and Chile I am really interested in for the food, nature and skiing destinations. I am also interested in Colombia and Uruguay as well.