Morning all, it’s me again. This is Cold Isle, the only newsletter you need (if you like getting smarter about data centers.)

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• US and China face off: the chips war gets hotter 💥

• 250 data centers? Not really, but still cool.

• Who’s got the hottest servers: Hooters or Colocators?🦉

• Hot links 🌭

• Daily Dal-E Top

Est. read time: 3mins 46secs

LET’S JUMP IN…

Chippin’ away at China’s semi dominance

With the passing of the CHIPS act this past year and a new posture towards China, the US has officially started the semi-conductor cold war.

Last year was the first time that the US announced verbally that it had changed its orientation towards china regarding microchip production.
A Biden’s rep Jake Sullivan actually went out and said, historically our goal has been to stay a couple of generations ahead of China, but now we recognize it’s important to “maintain as large a lead as possible.”

So how exactly are they doing this? The CHIPS act was a big one - that’s $52 billion in domestic semiconductor spending, increased incentives for production and research, and a lot of other stuff.
The US is also actively hampering the Chinese’ ability to produce their own high-tech chips by:

• banning US citizens from working to advance Chinese chip technology

• obstructing the import/export capabilities of dozens Chinese companies and research labs

• making it illegal to sell the SMEs to China which is necessary for innovation.

Oh yeah, and we’re also expecting our allies to do the same thing.

Risks

And therein lies one of the biggest risks of Biden’s policy. The success of this aggressive stance relies on our allies’ willingness to go along with our imposed embargo. China makes a very attractive trading partner, and it won’t be easy to rally the rest of the western world (and most of the eastern) to not answer when the Chinese come knocking.
(And it’s not like the US polled the room. We moved and are expecting everyone else to follow.)

The other big risk is damaging the competitiveness of US companies. It’s possible that these moves will cut US chip manufacturers out of the Chinese market entirely. That’s estimated to cost over $100 billion annually in lost sales and jobs.
Plus, semiconductors are going to be significantly more expensive…

The real knife edge of the story is this: the US currently leads the world in the chip design software and the SME necessary for semiconductor innovation. China has a massive capacity for manufacturing, but they do no innovation. Biden is making significant and aggressive moves to keep it this way.

Here’s the link to the Atlantic Council’s white paper again. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/united-states-china-semiconductor-standoff-a-supply-chain-under-stress/

What else you should be reading…

📝 Digitalinfra.com made a list of the top 250 data center companies, ranked by a mix of revenues, portfolio size by MW and sqft. WARNING: it’s a weird list, it organizes the companies into five size categories, and then within those lists them alphabetically? 
Still, it’s an interesting look at the relative size of the industry’s biggest players.

🔥 These new chips are outkicking their coverage… According to Uptime, the industry has reached the point where cooling technology cannot keep up with the server power consuption produced using the new generation of chips.
Without innovation on the cooling end, the future for the use of future chip innovation is uncertain.

📶 Telecom and the coming edge-computing boom. If you don’t read LightReading, I would start - great information on the telecoms industry. This one points out that tower companies are partnering with vendors en masse to ensure their ready for the impending explosion in edge-computing use cases.
The hinge point, according to LR, to the edge’s success is going to be on how well the industry can establish open source APIs.

🏛️ Data Bank is at it again! Check out their new 3.2MW expansion in San Diego.

💬 EXPLAINED: Data center tiers. HP does a primer on the specifics of each DC tier and the reasoning behind the parameters that go into each one.

Hot links 🌭

Daily Dal-E

“The data center revolution will not be televised.”

That’s it for me, thanks for reading. Please let me know what you thought of today’s newsletter. You can just respond to this email.

PS. Ok last thing… I don’t know if these are ever going to be a thing, but I really hope so. Imagine the party you could throw on one of these…