Wrapping up a great few days at the AI Infra Summit in Silicon Valley!
I came to better understand where capital and business opportunities are emerging across AI infrastructure, particularly where my experience in Bitcoin mining, power-intensive infrastructure and hardware distribution can translate.
3 takeaways from 3 days:
1. Capital is flowing into infrastructure, but deployment is increasingly complex. Securing GPUs, finding readily available power, and hiring experienced experts are major bottlenecks right now. And you need to have your ducks in a row across power, land, permitting, insurance, cooling, cabling, networking, financing, construction and beyond before diving in.
2. There is no one-size-fits-all data center. Compared with Bitcoin mining sites, AI infrastructure can vary significantly more depending on the workload and other factors. Before building anything you must consider what hardware should be deployed, rack density, power and cooling requirements, network architecture, and more. Most software solutions are said to be overestimating what they need in terms of computational power, while I think most of the world is underestimating what it takes to make institutional scale compute go live in an efficient, safe, and practical manner.
3. The Bitcoin mining crossover is real. I ran into several people from our industry who are either actively expanding into AI infrastructure or evaluating where they can participate, from complete data center buildouts to equipment and infrastructure distribution. For Bitcoin miners looking to diversify, AI introduces additional complexity around networking, redundancy, uptime requirements and hardware architecture.
For TicTacc, that crossover is particularly interesting. We have spent years working across global Bitcoin mining hardware and infrastructure, and we’re now evaluating where that experience, and capital, can be applied across the rapidly growing AI infrastructure ecosystem.
I recommend everyone in the Bitcoin and AI industries to visit Silicon Valley and see just how they’re moving the world forward here. It’s incredible. Being surround by mountains and a beautiful coast isn’t that bad either!
I’ll be in San Francisco for a few days before heading to the Midwest Bitcoin Summit. If anyone else is around and would like to meet up, please reach out!