Usenet or Fidonet would be a more apt comparison

They say supercomputer, but do they count Google/Amazon datacenters or just “named” supercomputers like the DoE’s scientific clusters?

AWS surely has more total compute capacity across its many datacenters

Water is another issue for xAI. Data centers use massive amounts of water to cool their servers; xAI says it will need 1 million gallons of water a day

“It would put stress on the wellfield,” says Scott Schoefernacker, science director for Protect Our Aquifer. He adds that “a lot of the water is just being used as cooling and it evaporates.”

Presumably it’s for evaporative cooling towers? I can’t imagine they’re heating it up from ambient and dumping it down the drain.