ChatGPT came out in 2022, and the Chinese government declared AI infrastructure a national priority. Over 500 new data centres were announced in 2023 and 2024. Private investors went all-in.

Demand for the data centres turns out not to be there. Around 80% are not actually in use. [MIT Technology Review]

The business model was to rent GPUs. DeepSeek knifed that, much as it did OpenAI. There’s now a lot of cheap GPU in China. Data centre projects are having trouble finding new investment.

The Chinese data centre boom was a real estate deal — many investors pivoted straight from real estate to AI.

Data centre operators would get power generation permits, then sell the power back to the grid instead of using it themselves. Other operators used their projects to get state-backed loans.

Data centre manager Fang Cunbao told MIT Technology Review: “Everyone I met is leveraging the data center deal for something else the government could offer.”

The Chinese government still wants self-reliance in AI. They’re not worried about the low end failing, as long as the country finishes with more capacity than it started.

The top end of tech in China is still investing — in 2025, phone operators plan to spend $12 billion on AI. ByteDance are spending $20 billion. Alibaba is spending $53 billion. [Light Reading; Reuters]

Chinese companies still want data centres — even buying capacity in Malaysia to serve the broader Asian market. They’re just not so interested in the cheap local ones. [Star]

• Video version

In October of 2023, Marc Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), published the “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” arguing that human ingenuity has been stagnated and demoralized by regulation, and that the only viable path forward for society is the accelerated development and adoption of new technologies, and specifically artificial intelligence. 

Andreessen was only formalizing and articulating a position that had already gained traction among tech company executives and Twitter shitposters like @BasedBeffJezos (Andreessen crowned him a “patron saint” of techno-optimism), who adopted the label of effective accelerationists, or e/acc. 

As the 2024 presidential election got closer, Andreessen, Elon Musk, other tech CEOs, and less consequential shitposters saw a natural alliance between their cause and Donald Trump’s campaign. Trump wanted to slash and burn government regulation in all forms, but also specifically in a way that would unleash tech and AI’s true potential. Joe Biden and the Democratic party, the party of big government, Lina Khan’s antimonopolist FTC, welfare, and fear of climate change, were luddites. They demanded that tech platforms limit speech they perceived to be harmful. They wanted AI regulated so it could limit real and theoretical harm in the future, including science fiction nightmares about artificial general intelligence. They were worried about the environmental and energy costs of mining cryptocurrency and massive datacenters for training frontier AI models. They were referred to as decelerationists (decels) and degrowthers, a derogatory umbrella term that covers everything from the ambition to actually reduce the number of humans of the planet in order to make it more sustainable (a future most vividly imagined in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future) to any form of regulation on AI. Andreesen is so passionate about this position in his manifesto that he says that this type of regulation is “a form or murder” because it could stop the development of life saving technologies, and makes a list “enemies” of AI, which includes supporters of “sustainability,” “social responsibility,” and “trust and safety,” the latter of which refers to the people at tech companies who try to keep platforms safe for users. 

The good news for Andreessen and the accelerationists is that they backed Trump and he won. Andreessen is advising the administration. Venture Capitalist David Sacks is the White House AI and crypto “czar.” Musk and his posse of young engineers from his companies are doing the slashing and burning themselves. The regulation on AI and everything else they didn’t like is in the process of being removed, and the administration is working on tax cuts that will benefit them all. 

The bad news for these people is that Trump is also the Decel-in-Chief. The most painfully obvious evidence for this is Trump’s cataclysmic tariffs this week, which sent the stock market tumbling, and will be particularly damaging to giant tech companies. The problem here is not just "uncertainty in the markets.” As Jason wrote yesterday, the tariffs are aggressive, wide ranging, and very painful for tech companies that rely on complex global supply chains. It seems that the Trump administration tried to at least temporarily throw the tech industry a bone here by exempting semiconductors from these tariffs, but as the Wall Street Journal explains, this is a fantasy: 

Unless Trump folds, the tariffs will make the price of everything go up. Unemployment will go up. People will buy less stuff, and companies will spend less money on advertising that powers tech platforms. The tech industry, which has thrived on the cheap labor, cheap parts, cheap manufacturing, and supply chains enabled by free and cheap international trade, will now have artificial costs and bureaucracy tacked onto all of this. The market knows this, which is why tech stocks are eating shit. 

Meanwhile, there is deafening silence from Musk, Andresseen, and the usual e/acc shitposters, who spent the last three months doing victory laps for Trump’s win, owning the libs, and posting AI-generated images of the glass tower cities and Mars space colonies that will be built under Trump’s admin and unrestrained technological progress. 

We'd be quiet too if we were them because it’s such a humiliating self own. Maybe, like many other pundits, they thought that Trump was just bluffing about tariffs. Maybe they thought they could push him in a direction that was purely beneficial to their industry. He might still back down. But at least for now, what the accelerationists did here by backing Trump is not just accidentally shoot themselves in the foot, but methodically blow off each of their toes with a .50 caliber sniper rifle. 

Even on a long enough timeline, there is no world in which the techno-optimist utopia comes to be in the United States under protectionist, isolationist policies. The Trump administration has also set to work dismantling the academic, scientific, research, and immigration infrastructures that have allowed business and innovation to thrive in the US, and the soft-power structures that have made it easy for tech companies to enter and dominate markets all over the world. Even if Americans believed and wanted to go back in time to a post WWII or turn of the century US economy, which has always been the backwards looking, regressive mantra of the MAGA movement, it is inherently incompatible with progress and the future because the future is not about cranking out Sherman tanks and gas powered Buicks. The techno-optimist utopia relies on the complex supply chains Trump threw into chaos this week, where different manufacturing and fabrication hubs with highly specialized expertise feed into a mutually beneficial system of free markets in order to make iPhones, semiconductors, lithium batteries, and so on. Trump has also thrown chaos into America’s software and service businesses, which require a neverending supply of new markets and new people to sell to in the name of chasing growth, scale, and new users; growing something like Facebook or OpenAI with the scale the stock market wants to see requires signing up users by the countryload; that’s far easier to do in a regulatory environment where you’re a willing partner with those countries, not creating trade wars and isolationist bureaucracies. 

As Peter Thiel loves to say, venture capitalists can invest in either bits or atoms, meaning digital products, or actual physical things. Trump is currently fucking Silicon Valley on both ends. 

Making things will be much harder even if we adopt the fantasy that a lot of manufacturing jobs can be reclaimed from countries like China, India, and Vietnam, because we simply don’t have the atoms we need in the United States. America has used countries around the world both for their raw materials but also for their cheap labor; the “trade deficits” that Trump speaks of are largely due to American companies setting up factories in places with cheap labor and extracting value from those countries to sell products to Americans. It’s Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and other American conglomerates that benefit most from global trade, not the factory workers making a few dollars a day. Moving this infrastructure to the United States is not advisable or feasible because lots of the jobs American companies have outsourced to China have already been outsourced from there to poorer countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, and India because many Chinese people have realized they don’t want to do this type of work. And many of those jobs are being automated by robots. Those jobs aren’t coming back to the United States, and we shouldn’t want them to, anyway. Meanwhile, the United States has exactly one rare Earth mineral mine in the entire country, which itself only became active after years of mishaps, regulatory mess, a bankruptcy, and a period of Chinese ownership.

And we’re not going to make the bits as well either because Trump is aggressively instigating a brain drain we’ve never seen in the US before. It’s harder for the best talent in the world to immigrate here, and how long will they even want to when ICE can disappear them off the street without reason. Researchers and scientists born in the US are getting their funding pulled because it’s woke, so they’re looking to move to other countries. Musk and Doge are “deleting” the very agencies and programs that breathed life into the semiconductor industry, electric cars, the internet, etc. We just don’t see how accelerationist dreams about biotech and human longevity can come to pass without the research the administration is actively trying to kill. 

This is not an endorsement of Andressen’s techno-optimist vision for the future. It’s certainly not an endorsement of what Trump is doing now, though We share the glee in seeing Tesla’s stock tank. Again, it is possible that Trump will fold as he has in the past, but as things stand today, America’s vision for the future has never been more dim and decelerated, and that includes the fantasies of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley.

Almost two dozen repositories of research and public health data supported by the National Institutes of Health are marked for “review” under the Trump administration’s direction, and researchers and archivists say the data is at risk of being lost forever if the repositories go down. 

“The problem with archiving this data is that we can’t,” Lisa Chinn, Head of Research Data Services at the University of Chicago, told 404 Media. Unlike other government datasets or web pages, downloading or otherwise archiving NIH data often requires a Data Use Agreement between a researcher institution and the agency, and those agreements are carefully administered through a disclosure risk review process. 

A message appeared at the top of multiple NIH websites last week that says: “This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with Administration directives.”

Repositories with the message include archives of cancer imagery, Alzheimer’s disease research, sleep studies, HIV databases, and COVID-19 vaccination and mortality data. A list identified by an archivist includes: 

• DASH Data and Specimen Hub
• National COVID Cohort Collaborative
• The DANDI Archive 
• The Brain Image Library
• The Cancer Imaging Archive
• BioData Catalyst 
• National Sleep Research Resource
• National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center
• AgingResearchBiobank
• Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas
• ApoE Pathobiology in Aging & Alzheimer’s Disease
• Child Language Data Exchange System 
• LDbase
• Cellular Senescence Network (SenNet)
• The National Center for Advancing Translation Sciences’ OpenData Portal
• Catalog of the NINDS Human Cell and Data Repository
• The Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative
• HIV databases
• The Neuroscience Multi-Omic Archive 
• The Human Health Exposure Analysis Resource Data Center
• Mouse Models of Human Cancer Database 

Based on archived versions of the websites, the message was added to most of the sites last week, around March 26 or 27. On March 28, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that HHS and agencies it oversees, including NIH, would lay off 10,000 full-time employees as part of a “reduction in force” plan. On Tuesday, at least five directors of NIH’s 27 institutes and centers were told they were put on leave. Kennedy’s plan outlines 1,200 layoffs at NIH alone. Yesterday, Kennedy said some of the cuts to programs will be reinstated.  “Personnel that should not have been cut were cut. We’re reinstating them,” he said. “Part of the DOGE—we talked about this from the beginning—is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.” Earlier this week, researchers filed a lawsuit challenging the cancellation of research grants totaling more than $2.4 billion over the past month by NIH. 

Under the Trump administration’s purge of public government websites and health resources,  archivists have been diligently saving what they can. But there are limits to what can be archived by volunteers, and many of these databases marked for “potential modification” can’t be saved.

"People don't usually appreciate, much less our current administration, how much labor goes into maintaining a large research dataset." 

Even if someone does have access through a DUA, they might not have long term access or the data might only be accessible through secure devices that aren’t connected to external networks, so data can’t be downloaded or backed up. And much of the data contains personally identifying information or health information that’s protected under HIPAA, which complicates volunteers’ efforts to store it. 

Henrik Schönemann⁩, a historian who started the Safeguarding Research & Culture archivist project, told 404 Media that as part of the project, they rely on institutions to help contribute storage; if they can’t guarantee all of the data is legal to download and store, they can’t save it in partnership with an institution if the opportunity arises. 

“In general it’s very important for us to be able to say to institutions, ‘yes we got public data, we did not break paywalls, we did not break any agreements, it’s fine for you to contribute with hosting,’” Schönemann⁩ said. The group is using Bittorrent to store and seed archived pages for now. But the NIH datasets under threat contain potentially multiple petabytes of data to be saved, and archivists need hosts to help with storage. “All of this is only possible for the publicly funded institutions if they can be sure they don’t host any infringing material,” he said. 

Researcher Captures Contents of ‘DEI.gov’ Before It Was Hidden Behind a Password

The list includes budget claims like ”$3.4 million for Malaysian drug-fueled gay sex app” and “Disbursed $15,000 to ‘queer’ Muslim writers in India.”

404 MediaSamantha Cole

“So far, it seems like what is happening is less that these data sets are actively being deleted or clawed back and more that they are laying off the workers whose job is to maintain them, update them and maintain the infrastructure that supports them,” a librarian affiliated with the Data Rescue Project told 404 Media. “In time, this will have the same effect, but it's really hard to predict. People don't usually appreciate, much less our current administration, how much labor goes into maintaining a large research dataset.” 

“The impacts that I’ve personally seen are that researchers lose five years of research because they once had access and now their DUA is up, and there’s no one in office, because they’ve been fired, to renew their DUA,” Chinn said. “This means researchers can’t publish (de-identified versions) papers based on data analysis they’ve already completed.” She gave an example of research from the Department of Education, which has decades of studies that some researchers use to compare student performance and learning outcomes that teach us about how wealth and location impact education. In a scenario where that data is lost, “we will not have access to that data to compare year over year shifts in performance,” she said. “We will also not be able to compare, on a national scale, where we stand in comparison to other nations.”

“Right now, the best I can do is advise the researchers that they need to get copies of the data that they are researching with that's restricted,” the librarian-archivist said. 

When most hikers are headed off the trail, Jonathan Knight is just getting started. The Denver-based artist prefers to photograph about 45 minutes after sunset, during “the last few minutes the sky has any blue hue in it and the last few minutes you can see without an external light source,” he shares. Once deep in the forest, Knight captures majestic waterfalls that cascade from rocky cliffs, their mist casting an ethereal haze across the scene.

“I had many nights of walking back two, three, four miles to the car alone with just a camera on my back and headlamp on my head,” he shares. “There was nothing more spooky than seeing the telltale glow of eyes within the beam of the headlamp. Lucky for me it was only ever our friends like elk or deer.”

Throughout 2022, Knight scouted waterfalls across California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado. He documented each in his signature minimal style, using low contrast to accentuate the natural beauty of his subject matter. “This project is really about the figure of the waterfall against negative space. The shape of the water becomes the subject,” he adds.

Knight offers prints of the Waterfalls series on his website, where you can view the entire collection. Follow his work on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Ethereal Waterfalls Cascade Across Darkened Landscapes in Jonathan Knight’s Photos appeared first on Colossal.

Taking play and infusing it with a healthy bit of danger, the Archipelago Playscape is a thoughtful structure, designed by Jakub Szczęsny and Karolina Potębska, in collaboration with Rainer Stadlbauer, for Kinder Kunst Labor, a wood and concrete children’s museum right in the heart of Altoona Park in St. Pölten, Austria. The designers were tasked with creating a multi-sensory indoor play area that catered to small children that also addressed the continued tendency to over-secure these kinds of spaces. The designers asked themselves: “How far could we go in making a space less devoid of potential risks?” Children need to learn to take some risks in order to build confidence, yet they also must be given places to do so. The Archipelago Playscape is a perfect place to get wild, while developing essential skills in the process.

Constant monitoring and overscheduling has left kids of the gentle parenting generation somewhat unprepared for the trials and tribulations that we can face as adults. The Window of Tolerance is a neuroscientific model that describes the best state of stimulation in which we are able to best live our lives. Short stints in hypoarousal (shutdown, freeze state) and hyperarousal (chaos, overwhelm) are normal as we navigate life, yet spending too long in these states can lead to neurological changes that impact us throughout our lives. Archipelago Playscape exists neatly within this spectrum, providing considered areas and functions that we wouldn’t normally see.

Kids build fine motor skills, self-trust, imagination skills, and more through experimenting in the physical world. As so much is new to them, practice is essential, forming a mass of data points that will shape their understanding of the world. Without a varied experience, kids will naturally become afraid, or unknowingly engage in risky behaviors later in life, unaware of the consequences. Extra precautions were taken to ensure that children would be a bit careful when navigating the wooden structure, with a maximum height of 47 inches and angles no bigger than 15%. And yet, it still seems welcoming, fun, and open-ended, not interested in leading children through a set, prescribed path. A semi-matte finish gives it a bit of grip, but not too much, allowing children to navigate distinct planes similar to natural terrain.

Archipelago Playscape offers a multitude of other fun activities as well – a “forest of ropes” featuring a composition of thick ropes that promotes motor skills, and a large bowl filled with space sand that allows kids to test out tactility. A set of steel profiles on the wall mimics a waterfall, promoting calm and offers auditory feedback, and a three-level ramp finishing with an elevated niche as a hide-out allows for a space to retreat and feel safe.

Jakub Szczęsny is a storyteller and designer based in Warsaw that finds the field of art and its applications a more adequate place for narratives than architecture. Working in accessory, clothing, and furniture design to larger scale projects such as exhibition design and interiors, he recognizes the importance of contextual analysis and inherent humanity in any design-related work.

Karolina Potębska is a designer dedicated to the cultural and sociological background of a space. Local context is everything, inscribing distinct meaning in materiality and consideration. Founding her own studio in 2020 has given her unique insight into her comprehensive approach, allowing her to carry out multidisciplinary projects for private clients and public institutions alike.

To learn more about the Archipelago Playscape, visit szcz.com.pl.

Photography by Patrick Johannsen, Max Kropitz, and Jakub Szczęsny.

Choosing the perfect glassware is an art in itself. Glassware might seem like just everyday objects, but the moment you find yourself in need of the right one – whether for a crisp martini, a slow-sipped negroni, or a refreshing highball – you quickly realize just how many details matter. The weight, shape, feel in your hand, and how it presents a drink are all deeply personal and preferential elements, making the decision unexpectedly complex.

Fortunately, NUDE’s latest collaboration with award-winning mixologist Giorgio Bargiani makes that choice a little easier. The Bar/Giani collection, a refined set of cocktail and mixing glasses, is designed to cater to both discerning bartenders and at-home mixologists. A signature stem, found across the entire collection – including glasses that are traditionally stemless – creates a cohesive design language. The result is glassware that enhances every pour, turning each drink into an experience worth savoring.

If there’s anyone to trust with designing elegant drinkware, it’s Bargiani. As Assistant Director of Mixology at London’s multi-award-winning Connaught Bar, he is one of the most influential figures in the global bar scene. His expertise is rooted in a family heritage of restaurants and boutique shops in Pisa, Italy, refined over nearly a decade at one of the world’s most celebrated bars. This background allows him to bring a refreshing perspective and creativity to the craft of creating unforgettable drinks.

For Bargiani, crafting the perfect cocktail means considering every detail, from the ingredients it’s made with down to the glassware it’s served in. “I always try to find new ways to create a personalized drinking experience for my guests, and wanted to create elegant designs that didn’t just belong to one style or environment,” he shares. “Each person can make this glassware their own and adapt it to their own taste and place – whether serving up a classic like a Negroni or Martini or presenting a signature creation, I designed this collection with a vision to encourage people to express their own creativity, like I do with my own drinks and guests.”

The Bar/Giani collection includes four cocktail glasses and one mixing glass, each crafted with thoughtful details that enhance the occasion. The highball glass, with its tall, slender silhouette, is designed to keep cocktails cool, ideal for drinks that are meant to be savored slowly. In contrast, the short cocktail glass features a wider rim, allowing ingredients and aromas to fully develop for a more flavorful sip. The martini and long-stemmed cocktail glasses offer a graceful, balanced handling experiencing, elevating every moment of the drink. Lastly, while mixing glasses are typically designed without a stem, the mouth-blown mixing glass continues the collection’s signature stem design, reinforcing its distinct aesthetic while ensuring a seamless stirring and pouring experience.

This collaboration between NUDE and Giorgio Bargiani elevates both professional bars and home cocktail rituals with a new level of elegance and versatility. With its timeless, artful designs, the Bar/Giani collection is destined to age as gracefully as the spirits it holds.

Giorgio Bargiani with collection

To learn more about the Bar/Giani collection by NUDE and Giorgio Bargiani, visit nudeglass.com.

Photography by Laura Edwards.