They’re working on something big in Abilene, Texas.
If you follow tech news, you’re probably aware that Softbank, Oracle and Microsoft have embarked on an ambitious initiative called Project Stargate, which is getting funded at the staggering amount of $500 billion, and that the project was formally announced at the U.S. White House, with the president as hype man. If you hadn’t read this article by some of our best people, you might not know that the plan is informally referred to as “Project Ludicrous,” even though it is really getting built, or that each of two twin facilities will have 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and draw 100 megawatts of electricity.
Chase Lockmiller has been part of the “boots on the ground” around the Abilene site. He’s the CEO of Crusoe, a company that’s been integral in getting all of these plans to become reality. Crusoe is involved in the funding, the building, and importantly, the energy handling around the operation, including harvesting power from nearby wind turbines.
At Imagination in Action, my colleague Dave Blundin caught up with Lockmiller in a segment on the Luminary stage, to talk about energy, AI, and everything in between, with a look at some big goals and objectives that have been milestone’s in Lockmiller’s interesting career.
Climbing Mount Everest
One of the big surprises from attending this talk is that Lockmiller has climbed Mt Everest not once, but multiple times.
This was a tall order, as you can imagine, given how life will intervene.
“They told climbers ‘we’re going to give you a five year window to use your permit – you’re allowed to come back,’” he said, describing how he felt after his initial climb and pointing out that scaling the mountain takes around a month and a half. “You can reuse your permit the next five years. So I had a five year window to basically try to come back and attempt this. And honestly, it was one of these things that haunted me – I’d just find myself thinking about it, I couldn’t stop thinking about wanting to go back.”
And so he did.
Fast forward a bit, and Lockmiller was taking on another big challenge – trying to stop flaring in the oil and gas business, where routine or emergency gas releases waste enormous amounts of energy comparable to the needs of a regional population.
I thought Lockmiller explained this to the audience well enough to use verbatim:
“When oil companies drill wells to produce oil, if they don’t have access to a pipeline, they use natural gas as an associated product,” he said. “If they don’t have access to a pipeline, they actually just burn it off. And this is actually one of the worst environmental problems in the world, because when they burn it off, the … combusted methane traps more heat in the atmosphere than CO2 and (it) accounts for about 3% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. And nobody benefits. It’s this complete waste.”
On to Abilene: Attention to Data Centers
From figuring out the energy needs around crypto, he said, it made sense to then pivot to AI, which is also a hungry type of operation.
“AI is obviously a natural fit, where it’s one of the most energy-intensive demands (where stakeholders are) looking for low cost, abundant power,” he said. “We should be building compute where we can access low cost and abundant power.”
Going over some of the logistics in energy harvesting in that part of the country, he pointed out that the users are mostly located around Silicon Valley. Lockmiller discussed the major proposed uses of the data center setup.
“Abilene is … 1.2 gigawatts … of power,” he explained. “It’s essentially designed one huge cluster for training, I think it’ll be training initially, but also post training, test time compute scaling, as the initial model is trained … that’s how I think about Abilene, as one cohesive unit.”
Working Together
Lockmiller also described his company’s plans as being centered in collaboration and not partial to a particular client brand.
“Anybody that wants to be in the race needs an Abilene-scale facility,” he said. “We’re not trying to pick winners or pick sides or anything. We just want to help people out. .. we support both Nvidia as well as AMD, and a lot of that’s driven from customers coming to us asking for choice. We want to be able to support choice in the ecosystem. And we also think that way with capital providers, right? We don’t have one single capital partner. We have many capital partners across the industry.”
Concluding, he noted that in so many ways, in business and in life, hindsight is 2020.
“I would have not guessed that I’d be building extraordinarily large physical infrastructure,” he said. “I think it’s one of the most important bottlenecks to scaling this technology wave.”
Next Steps
Abilene is big, and the eventual impact of Project Stargate will be even bigger. We’ll probably see more small nuclear plants, to support the colossal needs of modern data centers, because, as Lockmiller pointed out, everyone in the game needs this kind of production. Hopefully, we’ll see corresponding regulation of AI with personal data ownership, etc. and everything that we need to usher in a new era of technology in a healthy and equitable way. Stay tuned.
