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Infrastructure

The physical systems underneath digital power — chips, power grids, cables, data centres.

Essays & snapshots

AI is turning electricity into ammunition

The American military's appetite for fuel is famous enough to travel as a statistic without its footnotes. The more consequential change is quieter. Drones, sensors and battlefield AI have opened a second supply line, one measured in batteries, generators and watts, and the industrial base that would sustain it sits largely in China.

Essay6 min read

Abu Dhabi discovered another kind of power

In 2006 an Emirati company was forced out of American port terminals by a congressional revolt. Twenty years later two Abu Dhabi firms have been granted licence-free access to the most controlled technology the United States produces, on condition that they become American companies within a year. Something changed, and it was not only the money.

Essay6 min read

Europe has money. It needs factories.

A Munich startup is about to begin building three thousand interceptor drones a month, having raised roughly forty-six million euros in venture capital. What makes a production line at that scale financeable is the expectation that somebody will buy what comes off it, and Europe has spent a year learning how to manufacture that expectation.

Essay7 min read

Why geothermal power still begins with a very expensive hole

In Lanzarote, the residual heat of an eighteenth-century eruption cooks lunch for tourists. A few hundred kilometres west, an Icelandic-led consortium has begun drilling beneath Tenerife to find out whether the same kind of heat can carry an island's electricity system — with roughly half the exploration bill paid by the public.

Essay15 min read

What actually links data centres to the wildfires

As France carries out what its interior minister calls the country's largest peacetime evacuation, and Spain fights its biggest recorded fire, the AI buildout is being blamed for fires it did not start. There is a more serious question underneath, and it concerns the electricity grid rather than the water main.

Essay8 min read

The war didn't build the drone age — but it is splitting it in two

Passenger aircraft, agricultural fleets and medical-delivery networks were built largely from civilian technology and regulatory reform, rather than battlefield breakthroughs. The war's clearest legacy so far has been to turn their shared, China-centred supply chain into a strategic weapon.

Essay7 min read

The cloud has coordinates

For twenty years the cloud sold itself as placeless — an abstraction you rented by the hour. Then Iranian drones hit three Amazon datacenters in the Gulf, and the world's most important metaphor acquired a street address.

Essay · Infrastructure6 min read