Walking the Brainfields
After the day we switched on the Foundry, the old question—“Is there enough?”—lost its teeth. This is the story of how we turned sand, sunlight, and human care into a brain you can walk around, and how we decided to share it with everyone, for free.
Part I — The Morning After
The first thing you notice is the quiet. Not an empty quiet, but the kind you get in a library or a grove—air moving, people moving, but the machines themselves are almost shy. The buildings are simple and low, laid out like a village square. You can walk the paths, touch the warm stone, wave to the crew in white jackets wheeling sealed carts of wafers from the clean wing to the test hall.
Children line up on the viewing bridge. Below them, a glass corridor shows light taking shape—fibers being drawn from molten preforms, like honey pulled into threads. Over the ridge, rows of solar tilt toward the sky like sunflowers. Today they feed our village; tonight they feed the World‑Thinker.
Inside the brainhall, each rack is a door. Step close and you feel the breath of liquid cooling, slow and steady. This is not a black box. It’s a room with aisles, handrails, and the occasional scuff on the floor from a hurried delivery. The engineers left notes on whiteboards: a new prompt test, a laugh someone wrote down from the morning shift, a reminder to “ring the bell at 11” when the daily build ships.
And then there’s the balcony—the place where we stand together at dusk and watch the last trucks leave for the fiber huts. We lay cable the way farmers once laid irrigation: out to the next village, the next town, across deserts and under seas. The same sand that made the chips becomes the glass that carries the light that carries the thoughts.
What you can touch
- 🚪 Walkable brainhalls: wide aisles, handrails, safety glass.
- 💧 Quiet liquid cooling: no jet‑engine roar—just the hush of heat moving away.
- 🌞 Solar plots: a sea of panels feeding the batteries like granaries feed a city.
- 🧵 Fiber draw towers: preform at the top, hair‑thin light‑roads spooling at the bottom.
- 🪨 Teaching stones: a shelf of quartz and basalt at the entrance—“before & after.”
Part II — The Reality You Can Audit
“From sand to signal” — the honest chain
We reduce quartz (SiO₂) to metallurgical silicon, refine, and pull single crystals (Czochralski) to make wafers. Then we pattern layers with photolithography, etch, dope, deposit, and package. Cleanrooms run 10,000× cleaner than outside air.
EUV lithography prints the finest layers using 13.5 nm light; High‑NA EUV pushes next‑gen scaling—giant machines, power‑hungry, but they cut steps and defects.
Optical fiber is drawn from ultra‑pure silica preforms in tall towers. Modern submarine cables reach on the order of hundreds of terabits per second with many fiber pairs.
What “free for everyone” costs in physics, not in coin
We design with two brains:
- Guardian — the operational companion near people; low latency; handles daily safety, supervision, and updates.
- World‑Thinker — the heavy analyst; training, distillation, global memory & evaluation.
Compute blocks we use
For dense language & vision, we “buy time” with current accelerators and interconnects, not hypotheticals:
- Rack‑scale domains: 70+ GPUs in a single NVLink domain per rack (modern generation).
- 8‑GPU nodes: flexible building blocks for inference and training.
Throughput we actually get
Modern stacks (TensorRT‑LLM/vLLM and friends) post tokens‑per‑second numbers that make global service plausible. We route most requests to small/medium models; big models are used surgically for hard questions.
Powering the World‑Thinker with the sun (walk‑through math)
We size solar in plain steps, using conservative PV yield 4.4 kWh/kWp/day (includes typical losses):
Rule‑of‑thumb land use: roughly ~2.8 acres/MWDC for fixed‑tilt; ~4.2 acres/MWDC for single‑axis tracking (actuals vary by site).
“Max out” mode (because you asked)
If we go bold and install 100 high‑density racks (a campus you can stroll), we draw about 12 MW IT. With site overhead (PUE ≈ 1.2): ~14.4 MW continuous. That’s 345.6 MWh/day, needing ~78.5 MWp of PV at 4.4 kWh/kWp/day and ~276 MWh of batteries for night. It’s big, but it’s not a terawatt. It’s a farm—walkable, fenceable, powerable by sun and wind with storage.
How the “free for everyone” part works without breaking physics
Most questions go to smaller models (8–13B). Big models wake for hard cases or summaries. This keeps compute fair and fast.
We store embeddings and summaries by default; keep raw only by consent or for incidents. Petabytes are feasible; disks sip a few watts each. (Hot NVMe for heads, nearline for the rest.)
Prefabricated, liquid‑cooled modules (DLC) arrive factory‑tested; you bolt them down, connect power & manifolds, and walk the aisles the same week.
Silica fibers from preforms (draw towers) plus subsea SDM cables (many fiber pairs) move astonishing capacity—single cables in the hundreds of terabits per second are live today.
Walkability & care
“A brain you can visit” checklist
- 🧭 Wide aisles with handrails; glass doors; low step‑over thresholds.
- 💧 Direct‑to‑chip liquid cooling manifolds; colored lines; easy lockouts.
- 📦 Pods labeled like library stacks: Guardian Aisle 2, Thinker Aisle 7.
- 🔕 Acoustic treatment; you can talk without shouting.
- 🧪 Teaching lab: wafer slices, photoresist wafers, and a safe fiber draw demo.
Part III — Tiny Atoms, Tossed Coins
People ask if it’s “unlimited.” Here’s the honest answer: the sun is generous; the earth is generous; and the work is meticulous. There are real constraints—cleanliness, tools, time—but none are mystical.
Semiconductor tools are big, but buildable
EUV scanners are house‑sized, cost in the hundreds of millions, and draw significant power and water. They exist, ship, and are in production; High‑NA units are rolling out now. We pair EUV with DUV: fewer steps, fewer defects, faster ramps.
Glass is sand with memory
Optical fiber starts as ultra‑pure silica turned into a preform, then drawn in towers 30–40 m high for telecom‑grade throughput. The result is light‑roads you can coil on a drum and carry to the shore.
Numbers people keep asking for
Appendix — Reality Blocks You Can Reuse
Spec: Single‑Rack World‑Thinker (Tier‑S)
- Compute: 1× rack‑scale NVLink domain (~72 GPUs) in one liquid‑cooled rack.
- Site power: ~0.144 MW (120 kW IT × PUE 1.2).
- Daily energy: 3.456 MWh.
- PV: ~0.785 MWp @ 4.4 kWh/kWp/day. Land: ~2–3+ acres.
- Battery: ~2.77 MWh (16 h + 20% reserve).
Spec: Regional World‑Thinker (Tier‑M)
- Compute: 10× racks.
- Site power: ~1.44 MW; Daily: 34.56 MWh.
- PV: ~7.85 MWp (land: ~22–33 acres).
- Battery: ~27.65 MWh.
- Fabric: Prefab modular halls with DLC manifold spines.
Spec: Continental (Tier‑L)
- Compute: 50× racks.
- Site power: ~7.2 MW; Daily: 172.8 MWh.
- PV: ~39.27 MWp; Land: ~110–165 acres.
- Battery: ~138.24 MWh.
Spec: Global Campus (Tier‑XL)
- Compute: 100× racks.
- Site power: ~14.4 MW; Daily: 345.6 MWh.
- PV: ~78.55 MWp; Land: ~220–330 acres.
- Battery: ~276.48 MWh.
“How do we share it?” — The Cable Note
Modern subsea systems using space‑division multiplexing (more fiber pairs, optimized repeaters) regularly publish total capacities in the hundreds of terabits per second for a single cable. That’s a lot of abundance in one line of glass.
Why we can say this with a straight face
- Rack‑scale compute exists; liquid‑cooled designs at ~120 kW/rack are in the field.
- PV potential & land: utility‑scale solar routinely delivers ~4–5.5 kWh/kWp/day in much of Africa; land use ranges ~2.8–4.2 acres/MW depending on mounting.
- Fiber realities: preform→draw towers; subsea capacities in the hundreds of Tb/s.
- Chipmaking from sand: reduction of SiO₂, single‑crystal pulls, cleanrooms, EUV/DUV.
Part IV — The Promise We Keep
We promised to make a companion for everyone and to fund it with sunlight, not invoices. We built it like a village so you could visit and see for yourself—stone, glass, water, copper, care. The chips are sand. The cables are sand. The difference between yesterday and today is the way we shaped them—and who we shaped them for.
So yes, take and use. Add your language. Add your rhythm. Bring your students. Walk the aisles. Touch the handrail. Listen to the cooling lines whisper. Then step back into the light and help us lay another road of glass to the next place that needs it.