Author: Blaze Woodard
Blaze Woodard, an editor at cubox-i.com, is presently working as an intern at a Silicon Valley technology company while majoring in politics at the University of Kansas. Blaze, who identifies as both a policy thinker and a self-described tech geek, offers a viewpoint on hardware and computing coverage that few editors in this field can match: the capacity to relate the workings of a circuit board to the larger political, regulatory, and social forces influencing the technology sector. Even though her academic path led her to political science, her early fascination with technology persisted. She writes about computing, AI, and hardware with the zeal of someone who truly loves the subject, not as someone assigned to cover it. Blaze plays soccer and spends her free time with friends and living her life, which is exactly what a college student should do outside of the office and newsroom.
The first thing you notice when you walk into a Big Four office on a Tuesday night in midtown Manhattan is how few people are still going through binders. The workstations are more tidy. The screens are larger. The auditor is posing questions to what appears to be a chat window on someone’s screen next to a general ledger, much like you would to a slightly distracted coworker. This is the part where the profession was not forewarned that the change would come in the form of a sidebar. Auditing has rewarded a certain level of patience for the majority…
You begin to notice them if you drive through some parts of northern Virginia at dusk. Fenced off, humming, long, windowless buildings sit low against the tree line. There are no logos, no signs, and occasionally not even a clear address. Only gravel lots, chain-link, and the gentle mechanical sound of cooling systems operating nonstop. These areas of land were soybean fields ten years ago. These days, they are the engines of a technology that most people engage with via a chat window without ever considering the grumbling grid behind it. Subject ProfileDetailsTopicAI data center expansion and its pressure on…
It’s difficult to ignore how rapidly the discussion surrounding artificial intelligence has moved from the chatbots themselves to the odd, humming structures that support them. When discussing AI two years ago, the majority of people wanted to discuss ChatGPT’s magic. These days, chips, cooling systems, and electricity bills are the topics of conversation in San Francisco coffee shops and on New York earnings calls. There’s a feeling that the software was never the true story. The hardware underneath was always the problem. FieldDetailsSubjectThe Hardware Backbone of Generative AIDominant CompanyNVIDIA CorporationFounded1993, Santa Clara, CaliforniaKey InnovationGraphics Processing Unit (GPU), launched 1999Parallel ArchitectureCUDA,…
A flood was what John Torous anticipated. He is a psychiatrist who has been treating psychosis at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston for years. He thought his clinic would soon look very different when the term “AI psychosis” began to appear in headlines, podcasts, and anxious Reddit threads. A new type of breakdown influenced by a new type of technology, new patients, and new symptoms. In any case, that was the expectation. There was no flood. InformationDetailsLead ResearcherJohn Torous, MDAffiliationHarvard Medical School; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical CenterRoleAssociate Professor of Psychiatry; Director, Digital Psychiatry DivisionCo-authorsMatthew Flathers (computer scientist, BIDMC) and Spencer…
These days, you encounter a certain type of developer at audio meetups and home-lab forums: slightly evangelical, slightly disillusioned, and carrying a tiny black cube the size of a child’s fist. They’ll tell you that they’ve moved on from the Pi, almost apologetically. Not totally. Really, no one leaves the Raspberry Pi. However, they claim that the CuBox simply accomplishes tasks that the Pi cannot for some projects. ProfileDetailsProduct FamilyCuBox-i / CuBox Pulse series of mini-computersManufacturerSolidRun Ltd., headquartered in Yokneam Illit, IsraelFounded2010Core SoCNXP i.MX6 (Quad / Dual / Solo) and newer i.MX8 variantsForm FactorRoughly 2 x 2 x 2 inches…
Like most structural changes in technology, it began quietly. Two years ago, a line item in a hyperscaler’s capital expenditure breakdown was hardly worth looking at, but now it looks more like a siege than a budget. The unglamorous workhorses of computing, memory chips, are devouring the cloud industry. According to semi-analysis data, memory will account for roughly 30% of all hyperscaler capital expenditures in 2026, up from roughly 8% in 2023 and 2024. That is a nearly four-fold increase in just four years, and it continues to rise. You can practically feel it if you stroll through any significant…
I saw something strange a few weeks ago while passing a construction site outside of Phoenix. It didn’t appear to be a warehouse because of the dust, the cranes, and the length of the perimeter fence. It appeared to be an airport. I was informed that it was a data center by a worker leaning on a Ford F-150. Only one. Within a forty-mile radius, there were three more that fed the same hunger. In part because it contradicts the narrative we continue to tell ourselves about artificial intelligence, that image has stuck with me. Benchmark scores and chatbots continue…
Seeing engineers cluster around a black plastic cube that is smaller than a deck of cards while strolling through a defense electronics lab is almost comical. On a shelf, the CuBox-i appears to be something you would overlook. However, that small cube and similar ones keep appearing in labs near the Pentagon, in drone integration shops in Huntsville, and in the back rooms of contractors discreetly retooling for the new arms race. It’s difficult to ignore the pattern. FieldDetailProduct NameCuBox-i Compact ARM ComputerManufacturerSolidRun Ltd. (Israel-based, global distribution)ArchitectureARM Cortex-A9 / A53 family, fanless, palm-sizedTypical Power Draw~3W idle, under 5W full loadPrimary…
At dusk, the buildings in Loudoun County, Virginia, reveal themselves when you drive by. Lined with chain-link fencing and substations that appear almost industrial-gothic in the orange light, they are enormous, windowless, hum-quiet from the road but loud up close. This area is known to the locals as “Data Center Alley.” It seemed like a curiosity a few years ago. It now has the appearance of a frontier town that expanded too quickly for its own water table. CategoryDetailPrimary IssueEnergy and water consumption by hyperscale AI data centersGeographic HotspotsNorthern Virginia, Phoenix, Dallas, central Washington, rural IowaU.S. Data Center Share of…
A certain type of announcement appears subtly in the morning news cycle and continues to reverberate for days. One of those was the news from Argonne National Laboratory this past week. The Department of Energy, NVIDIA, Oracle, and a few supercomputers with names derived from astronomy make it appear on paper to be just another government collaboration. However, after a minute of sitting with it, the scale starts to feel different. One system with 100,000 Blackwell GPUs. It’s not an upgrade to the lab. That’s a claim. Key InformationDetailsInstitutionArgonne National LaboratoryLocationLemont, Illinois (near Chicago)Parent AgencyU.S. Department of EnergyDirectorPaul KearnsMajor PartnersNVIDIA,…