Hello Reader,
I was under the weather this week. Thankfully, things cleared up relatively quickly and I only skipped a couple of days of writing. The cough appears to be almost gone, which is great as I'm prone to weeks or even months-long bouts.
Today, I want to talk about Elastic{ON} Singapore, which I'll be attending later this month, as well as the glaring threat to data centres no one saw coming. I also want to leave you with a question: Where are the Vera Rubins?
Are you going to Elastic{ON} Singapore?
I'll be attending the Singapore leg of Elastic's upcoming conference on 17 March, so ping me if you're going too. Elastic is the company behind Elasticsearch, a powerful open-source distributed search engine. I believe it's not too late to sign up.
Even better, I'll be recording a podcast onsite with Laurence Liew, Director of AI Innovation at AI Singapore. You might know Laurence as the architect of the AI Apprenticeship Programme (AIAP) launched in 2018, well before AI became a buzzword thanks to generative AI.
As I wrote this, I was reminded of how much of a maverick Laurence is. He published a book in 2024 titled "AI-First Nation," written in slightly over two months. This was achieved by leveraging AI as a biographer, transcriber, co-writer, and editor.
But were it not for his detailed explanation in the book itself, you wouldn't have guessed it was AI at all. And that was with Gemini Pro 1.5, ladies and gentlemen. Earlier Gemini models were rather "sterile" compared to what a frontier model like Claude Opus 4.6 is capable of today. I find that beyond impressive.
I'll be asking Laurence about the way forward for Singapore, how workers and students can prepare themselves to build with AI, and his "aha" moments along the way.
The threat no one saw coming
When war exploded in the Middle East last weekend, it laid bare a vulnerability that the data centre industry thought it had long resolved: the physical kind. I've had the fortune to tour many data centres over the years, and one thing you are constantly reminded of is how formidable their security is.
You feel it before even entering the facility. High perimeter fencing, anti-ram bollards or crash-rated barriers popular in markets like Singapore (thanks to MAS' TRM Guidelines). Then there are the X-ray machines, mantraps, multiple access-controlled doors, absence of windows, and ubiquitous video monitoring systems - just to name a few.
Alas, all of this can come undone with a relatively cheap US$20K drone. Last weekend, drones reportedly targeted three separate data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, causing fires and outages across the affected cloud Availability Zones.
What makes drone strikes particularly devastating is that, unlike a typical fire, they also cause structural damage that must be evaluated before operations can resume. The explosives and onboard fuel likely triggered a conflagration burning hotter and spreading across a much broader area than a conventional fire. So, a lot more damage.
Despite the perpetual secrecy around data centres, industry professionals know a simple truth: we know exactly where they all are. I may not be able to pinpoint every single one off the top of my head, but there are multiple services and reports that will give you the location of virtually every facility for a fee. Or just do an AI search.
And while Iran's militarised drones carry significant explosive payloads that non-state actors would struggle to procure, I'll point out that the average data centre has multiple mission-critical systems that must be exposed to open air. Cooling towers, chillers, backup generators. A consumer-grade drone and a Molotov cocktail could be all it takes.
Where are the Vera Rubins?
A friend posed an innocuous question to me this week. "Have you heard of any plans around Vera Rubin deployments? Seems quiet." Turns out I hadn't, and some informal enquiries are making me question if Nvidia's next-gen GPUs for frontier AI training will make their way to the region anytime soon.
There are a few reasons, among them the sheer challenges of scaling up data centre racks to 600kW for the Vera Rubin Ultra. Then there's cost, and an extremely limited customer pool with such requirements. I'm digging into this and will share more as the picture becomes clearer.
But I'd love to hear from you. Are you working on any planning for the Vera Rubin, including the NVL72 and NVL144?
As usual, just reply to this email to reach me.
Missing newsletters: Thank you to those who got back to me about missing newsletters. This confirms what I've observed. My challenge is balancing the complexity of my newsletter setup with improving inbox placement rates. Would it help if I shared a link to the commentary via WhatsApp Channel (link below) each week? Suggestions are welcome.
Regards,
Paul Mah
