spacex mentioned in their latest earnings call that they’re investigating modular inference clusters. the mechanical engineering behind warehousing compute is already hard, so why would they go through the effort of making the challenge more difficult by making their compute modular (portable and sized for transportation)?
1. electricity cost: as an example, electricity prices can vary by 10x within texas alone. being able to pick up your compute and move it allows you to take advantage of the electricity market. ai inference is a rare commodity where supply is geographically disconnected from demand. you can take advantage of dirt-cheap electricity and still serve compute to high-cost-of-living markets like nyc with negligible performance impact (latency)
2. labor: one of the factors going into the placement decision is whether or not you can staff the facility. logistics companies like ups, fedex, and walmart fight with this constantly. it's a large factor in deciding where a new facility will be located
3. upgradability: a huge part of designing these facilities is planning for future expansion or upgrades. modularity lets you define standard interfaces, which makes ripping out and replacing "units" of the warehouse easier than treating it like a brownfield project to upgrade. it's extra work on the front end to define and standardize these interfaces, but doing so pays off in the future
4. cost and scale: it's cheaper and faster to scale from 1x to 1,000,000x with a modular design by just connecting units together rather than designing for your target scale through greenfield or brownfield development. you also get economies of scale (wright's law) with this method. remember: there will be factories producing these "units". need more compute? stamp out more units. no need to customize. interestingly, this also reduces risk by pushing capex commitments further down the line when more information is available. if ai is what we think it is, just make more units. if it isn't, just make fewer
5. performance: the primary limiting mode of heat transfer in these systems, regardless of whether they are open-loop or closed-loop, is convection, not conduction or radiation:
qDot = hA(T_out-T_in)
qDot is your heat transfer rate (roughly, how much power it takes to cool the system)
h will always be the same (with fluctuations depending on external factors like humidity that you can't really control)
A (area) you can't change -- it's effectively your "fin," which is set
and T_out is effectively the surface temperature of the chips you're trying to cool
this leaves T_in -- which, for closed-loop systems, is roughly geographically independent. but for open-loop systems...
anyways, all of this comes together to make sense. interestingly, tinycorp is doing this too with their exabox. tiny has a lot of engineering challenges with their thermals and have real challenges with 4 and 5, but spacex will be able to
Watch live as SpaceX discusses our Q3 2026 earnings at 3:30pm CT today → xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1PKqrNbLZ…
investors tell me they give sheet metal man and wife more money to make more sheet metal. this good. me like
Okay it’s happening:
- Added 160k square feet in Reno for our automated high volume lines and parts up to 5’x10’. Operational now.
- Added 170k square feet in Pittston PA for 1-day shipping (or faster) to the Northeast US. Landing machines and growing the team now.
- Southeast US is next (flying out next week to negotiate a lease). 3 more leases in 3 more states to sign after that. Expect massive lead time reductions across our factory network.
- Finalizing our first acquisition and working on the second and third. These are services you’ve been asking for. More coming. We’ll be able to say yes to more of your BOM.
- Welding is ramping nicely. More assembly support soon.
- More materials and capabilities for CNC machining in development now, including much smarter pricing. Increased capacity will also help us cut lead time drastically.
- Added 450 people so far this year. Hopefully double that in 2027.
- Candy and merch budgets have been tripled.
…And we’re just getting started. That’s a big part of why we raised again: to build more, ship faster, and make manufacturing easier and more accessible. I’m doing my best for ya. I love you guys.
Big thanks to @willreed at @sparkcapital , @caitlinbolnick1 at @CRV, @marksugarman at MHS, @andrew__reed at @sequoia and @matthuang at @paradigm for supporting our Series B (and the extra rocket fuel)
LFG!!!!! 🇺🇸
em m0shouris retweeted
Okay it’s happening:
- Added 160k square feet in Reno for our automated high volume lines and parts up to 5’x10’. Operational now.
- Added 170k square feet in Pittston PA for 1-day shipping (or faster) to the Northeast US. Landing machines and growing the team now.
- Southeast US is next (flying out next week to negotiate a lease). 3 more leases in 3 more states to sign after that. Expect massive lead time reductions across our factory network.
- Finalizing our first acquisition and working on the second and third. These are services you’ve been asking for. More coming. We’ll be able to say yes to more of your BOM.
- Welding is ramping nicely. More assembly support soon.
- More materials and capabilities for CNC machining in development now, including much smarter pricing. Increased capacity will also help us cut lead time drastically.
- Added 450 people so far this year. Hopefully double that in 2027.
- Candy and merch budgets have been tripled.
…And we’re just getting started. That’s a big part of why we raised again: to build more, ship faster, and make manufacturing easier and more accessible. I’m doing my best for ya. I love you guys.
Big thanks to @willreed at @sparkcapital , @caitlinbolnick1 at @CRV, @marksugarman at MHS, @andrew__reed at @sequoia and @matthuang at @paradigm for supporting our Series B (and the extra rocket fuel)
LFG!!!!! 🇺🇸
I'm back in Reno after a few days of visiting customers. Holy shit, I'm pumped. Now is the time:
I’m building the largest, fastest, vertically integrated manufacturing company in North America. Full-scale contract manufacturing that is accessible to EVERYONE.
- speedy like a startup
- millions of sq ft of capacity
- all the capabilities you need
- world class UI/UX/service/support
- High mix, low volume
- High mix, high volume
- Low mix, low volume
- Low mix, high volume
America is manufacturing again, and I'm gonna provide the engine.
Fuck it, we ball 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
everyone recreating their favorite CAD package with AI is about to find out where that license money that didn’t go to improving the product went (lawyers)
if you're an engineer, i highly recommend learning how to write software. it's very rewarding, and as it turns out, very useful
for mechanical at least, i don't feel like i'm losing my engineering ability despite getting into software. it seems to be like riding a bike
holy hell. i had no idea autodesk could do this:
if you use fusion they can force you to install arbitrary software of their choosing to snoop on your computer and you’re legally required to comply within 15 days
this is insane
This is a wild approach, @autodesk.
We’re a small business paying $380 per user, per month. We’ve been paying customers for over a decade, and we make a deliberate effort to honor the license agreements for every product we use. Your software already requires authentication and an assigned license. What, specifically, prompted this email?
Earlier today, I had two conversations on two separate podcast episodes about your direction with Fusion and why cloud-based API access makes sense for agentic MEP workflows. I was making the case for Autodesk. I think the product direction is right based on recent posts from @andrew_anagnost.
Our company has been deciding where to invest our development effort: integrate our custom cloud agent harness into Autodesk, build on an open-source platform, or adopt one of the emerging cloud alternatives. That decision will lock in years of internal development and software spending. This decision is also central to our plans to expand @PermitZIP nationwide.
An email like this becomes part of that decision. So does the time we have to spend responding to it.For more than a decade, we’ve paid for anywhere from 5 to 30 licenses each year. Autodesk is our single largest SaaS expense. This is a heck of a way to make our next platform decision easier.
Starting next week, we’ll begin transitioning away from Autodesk products. We have nothing to hide and will cooperate with the audit. We’ll also be directing our future spending toward companies that earn our confidence as partners.
I hope your audit goes well.
the reason digital twins are bullshit is simple:
the maintenance tech on staff had a hangover and didn’t want to file the three pages of paperwork to replace a belt that wasn’t the exact PN because it wasn’t stocked
no one at corporate (salaried) ever finds out
