Anticipation -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49295INV. 

Brand New Phone! For About $70 

I have an old iPhone, SE, third generation, released in 2022. The other day I had a minor issue with the iPhone. The local iPhone repairman recommended a new screen protector and a new battery. Around $70. Feels and looks like a brand new phone. I only use my phone for texting and multi-factor authentication, and run-of-the-mill photography needs. That's the problem for Apple: their phones last forever. 

Tag: NVDA Nvidia Apple AAPL Foxconn 

So Much For All That Talk About A Bubble

This is why I love x. This story was all over the internet today -- all long paragraphs of prose. Except for x: to the point with a graphic or two. I'm lovin' it. Go to the link (below); it's all about racks and servers. 

Next up: Wistron (Taiwan Stock Exchange). 

Folks worried about an AI bubble? They're missing the forest for the trees. Quick: name another sector / industry with this rate of growth. Ride the wave. YOLO. FOMO. MOJO.

Link here.

Anticipation

October 5, 2025, Sunday night, futures:

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Cyndi Lauper

Tribute to the Grammy or something to that effect this evening.

Brought back great memories and even a few tears when Cher came on stage.  They're all fighters; they're all survivors; good for them.

This meant a lot to a lot of folks in the audience. 

Just wanna have fun. 

1994.

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NFL

I didn't see many games this weekend but of the few I saw, it sure looks like the SNF game, the New England Pariots, 2 - 2, vs the Buffalo Bills, 4 - 0 was second to none.

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A Musical Interlude

Rivers of Babylon.

Psalm 137. 

Link here. 

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Disclaimer
Brief Reminder 

Briefly:

• I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken and I am often well out front of my headlights. I am often appropriately accused of hyperbole when it comes to the Bakken.
• I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market.
• I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
• See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. 
• Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If something appears wrong, it probably is. Feel free to fact check everything.
• If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 
• Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken, US economy, and the US market.
• I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
• And now, Nvidia, also. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Nvidia. Nvidia is a metonym for AI and/or the sixth industrial revolution.
• I've now added Broadcom to the disclaimer. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Broadcom.

AI -- The Start-Ups -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49303AI. 

Link to The Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2025. Link here. 

Richland Parish Data Center -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49302META. 

The Richland Parish Data Center will be tracked here. 

META is building its largest-ever data center campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, near the city of Monroe. With an investment of $10 billion, the site will cover 2,250 acres and serve as a hub for the company's artificial intelligence (AI) operations. The data center is typically referred to as the Richland Parish Data Center. Will be over 2 GW. 

The site is located between Rayville and Delhi, Louisiana.

Four million square feet facility on 2,250 acres. So, another data point: four million square feet / 2 GW, or about 2 million square feet per GW. About $5 billion per GW. 

October 21, 2025: Funding update here. BlackRock among biggest investors. Link here. 

October 16, 2025:

Stargate -- More Background -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49301STARGATE. 

One can worry that Oracle is getting over-extended.  

Stargate. This is where I track Stargate.

See Barron's update on Stargate: OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank.

See the graphic at this post. Knowing most folks won't click on the link, here's the drawing:

Now the explanation: 

OpenAI's compute infrastructure follows a multi-pronged approach, drawing on multiple partners and strategies to power its vast training and inference workloads. Instead of relying solely on a single cloud provider, the company strategically builds and accesses large-scale GPU clusters to handle the immense computational demands of its frontier AI models.

The flow of this compute infrastructure can be broken down into three main categories:

• massive supercomputing projects: Large, multi-partner initiatives focused on building dedicated, high-power data centers.
• strategic cloud partnerships: Accessing and scaling existing cloud resources to meet both research and user-facing needs.
• specialized software and orchestration: The internal tools and systems that manage and optimize OpenAI's computational workloads.

1. Large-scale supercomputing projects: The Stargate initiative:

• the most significant known component of OpenAI's compute flow is the "Stargate" project, a long-term, multi-gigawatt data center initiative aimed at building the infrastructure for future AI. This is the "fuel" that drives the company's biggest breakthroughs.
• partnerships: Stargate is a joint venture that includes OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and NVIDIA.
• physical locations: Projects include a massive data center in Abilene, Texas, that is already operational, with five new U.S. sites announced in late 2025.
• energy and power: The sites are being developed to support immense power requirements, reaching gigawatt-scale capacity and necessitating new energy solutions.
• purpose: This infrastructure is designed to handle the multi-month, continuous computation needed for training the most advanced AI models.

2. Strategic cloud and hardware partnerships: 

While Stargate focuses on long-term expansion, OpenAI also relies on strategic partnerships to secure the hardware and cloud resources needed for its day-to-day operations.

• Microsoft Azure: As a key investor and partner, Microsoft provides access to its Azure AI supercomputers and cloud infrastructure for training and scaling models like GPT-4.5. OpenAI also leverages Azure for enterprise-grade services.
• NVIDIA: In a recent landmark deal, OpenAI and NVIDIA entered a strategic partnership to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of NVIDIA-powered systems. NVIDIA will also invest up to $100 billion to help fund this infrastructure expansion. The first phase of this new GPU hardware will be based on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform and is scheduled for 2026.
• Oracle: In addition to its role in Stargate, Oracle serves as a cloud infrastructure partner. Oracle is specifically leading the development of several new data center sites. Other providers: OpenAI also contracts with smaller cloud providers to secure additional compute capacity.

3. Internal software and infrastructure orchestration: 

Underpinning all this hardware is a sophisticated software stack developed by OpenAI to manage and optimize its compute resources.

• model training workflow: OpenAI engineers work on designing and scaling architectures, including techniques for training large models. This involves managing multi-datacenter training and ensuring fault tolerance across clusters of tens of thousands of GPUs.
• GPU infrastructure management: Internally, OpenAI's GPU infrastructure team designs and operates the systems that manage the immense GPU fleet. Their work includes:
• building user-friendly scheduling systems to maximize GPU utilization.
• automating Kubernetes (see below) cluster provisioning and upgrades.
• optimizing model startup times by ensuring fast snapshot delivery across storage and hardware caching.
• model serving infrastructure: For inference, or serving its models to users, OpenAI leverages a microservices and containerization architecture. This allows for efficient, low-latency, and highly available deployment of models like ChatGPT for hundreds of millions of users. For enterprise use, many customers also access OpenAI models through Azure's enterprise-ready services. 

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More

Kubernetes

Kubernetes, often abbreviated as K8s, is an open-source platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It acts as a container orchestrator, enabling organizations to run applications consistently across different environments by abstracting the underlying infrastructure. Key features include declarative configuration, automated rollouts and rollbacks, self-healing capabilities, and service discovery, making it a powerful tool for modern DevOps and cloud-native development.

In plain English:

Kubernetes (often called K8s) is a free, open-source system that helps you run and manage apps that are packaged into containers (small, self-contained units of software).

It takes care of automatically starting, stopping, and adjusting how many copies of your app are running, so everything stays reliable and balanced. It also hides the messy details of the servers underneath, so your apps can run the same way no matter where they’re hosted — on your laptop, in your company’s data center, or in the cloud.

Some of the useful things it can do include:

• setting up and updating apps automatically
• undoing updates if something goes wrong
• restarting apps that crash
• letting apps easily find and talk to each other

In short, Kubernetes is a tool that helps developers and IT teams easily run large, complex applications without constantly managing servers by hand.

**********************************
Disclaimer
Brief Reminder 

Briefly:

• I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken and I am often well out front of my headlights. I am often appropriately accused of hyperbole when it comes to the Bakken.
• I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market.
• I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
• See disclaimer. This is not an investment site. 
• Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If something appears wrong, it probably is. Feel free to fact check everything.
• If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 
• Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the Bakken, US economy, and the US market.
• I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Apple. 
• And now, Nvidia, also. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Nvidia. Nvidia is a metonym for AI and/or the sixth industrial revolution.
• I've now added Broadcom to the disclaimer. I am also inappropriately exuberant about all things Broadcom.
• Longer version here.

US Crude Oil Production -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49300OIL. 

Link here. July, 2025, data. Summer driving. All-time production record.

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Word Of The Day 

Ismael. Wiki. 

Theophoric. Wiki.

El: God.

Ishma: to hear, hears, variations thereof.

Abraham's first child by Hagar, Sarah's handmaiden.

Abraham's second child was Isaac, by his wife, Sarah. 

Isaac is the only patriarch whose name was not changed, and the only one who did not move out of Canaan. 

According to the narrative, he died aged 180, the longest-lived of the three patriarchs.  

Recent scholarship has discussed the possibility that Isaac could have originally been an ancestor from the Beersheba region who was venerated at a sanctuary.

"Call me Ishmael" is the iconic first line from Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, introducing the narrator and setting a tone of melancholy and a quest for experience. The phrase functions as both a simple statement of identity and an invitation to the reader, inviting them into the story and establishing a direct, though potentially unreliable, connection with the narrator.

Weather Forecast: Thanksgiving, 2025 -- Posted October 5, 2025

Locator: 49299WEATHER. 

Link here. 

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The Book Page

This is really cool. I learned two major things from this book. 

The book: Vienna: the Crossroads of Civilization, Angus Robertson, c. 2022.

The map of The Holy Roman Empire -- basically a bunch of tribal chiefdoms that federated themselves loosely under the Pope. Probably the most over-rated political entity ever. Even exact dates cannot be agreed upon. But, broadly, 800 - 1800. Nice round numbers. One thousand years. 

The various rulers did what they wanted, but had spectacular off-sites. LOL. I don't think anyone can really even name the "first among equals" within this motley crew.

The other thing I learned: why Vienna never developed into a major city-state of its own for any length of time. Unlike, let's say, Venice, Rome, Sicily, Carthage, Portugal, Spain, or the British Isles. Or even Boston for that matter. 

 

 

OpenAi's Infrastructure Map -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49298OPENAI. 

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OpenAI's Infrastructure Map

Link here. 

Sunday -- Day 5 Of The Government Shutdown -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49297ARCHIVES. 

Chess: link here. 

The lede plus a bit more:

Pawn pushers at a couple of low-stakes chess tournaments in Iowa and Louisiana recently sat down at their boards only to discover a surprising competitor: one of the highest rated chess players ever to live. 

Hikaru Nakamura, the No. 2 player in the world and five-time U.S. champion, had flown in as a last-minute entrant, making him far and away the top player in the building. Not only was he rated several hundred points higher than anyone else in the fields, he was also exponentially more famous, as the planet’s leading chess influencer.

It was the chess equivalent of Aaron Judge showing up to play Little League. 

Nakamura wasn’t there to tee off on inferior opponents—or for a few thousand bucks in prize money. He was exploiting an arcane loophole on a much larger mission to become the next chess world champion. But Nakamura’s maneuver hasn’t gone unnoticed. In the process, his tactics have sparked a rule change from FIDE, instant backlash to the change, and sent the chess world into a full-blown freakout.

It began with Nakamura needing to qualify for the most prestigious tournament in chess, known as the Candidates, where eight players compete for the right to challenge the defending world champion. The Candidates reserves one spot for the player with the highest rating, which would be Nakamura because world No. 1 Magnus Carlsen has withdrawn from contention.

Only FIDE, the game’s international governing body, requires that players have at least 40 classical games under their belts before the cycle is up. The problem is that Nakamura, who spends most of his time streaming to millions of followers and favors shorter formats in competition, keeps a light tournament schedule. As of June 1, he had played only 18 classical games this year.

That left him scrambling to rack up games anywhere he could—with little risk of letting his rating drop. Even he dubbed the exercise a “Mickey Mouse” tour. 

At the Louisiana State Championship and the Iowa Open Championship, he played a combined 11 games, winning all of them. And his opponents were simply in awe. They found themselves in the rare position of meeting a genuine chess celebrity, while also being manhandled by him on the board.

a 

Initial Production For Wells Coming Off Confidential List This Next Week -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49296WELLS. 

The wells:

• 41605, conf, CLR, Klepp 2-1H, West Capa, npd
• 38111, conf, Silver Hill Energy Operating, LFM2 18-06 161-93 BMB, Leaf Mountain, npd, 
• 41606, conf, CLR, Klepp 3-1H, West Capa, npd, 
• 41395, conf, CLR, Vachal FIU 12-27HSL, Alkali Creek, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	13287	32711
7-2025	18364	43842
6-2025	10581	17989

• 41642, conf, CLR, Klepp 4-12H, West Capa, npd, 
• 40827, conf, Grayson Mill, Falcon 25-27F 3H, Sixmile, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	0	21800
7-2025	28917	22558
6-2025	31774	26463
5-2025	18874	13680
4-2025	29027	16321

• 41643, conf, CLR, Klepp 512H, West Capa, npd, 
• 41112, conf, Hess, BL-Ray-155-95-0503H-5,
• 41111, conf, Hess, BL-Ray-155-95-0503H-4, Beaver Lodge, 

ate	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	18514	0
7-2025	24760	32209
6-2025	22970	26034
5-2025	10910	19027
4-2025	23105	24764

• 40982, conf, Hess, EN-Starla-157-93-0904H-6, Sorkness, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	17280	0
7-2025	20465	28967
6-2025	18539	18411
5-2025	17226	20457
4-2025	25558	18358

• 40788, conf, Oasis, Bitterroot 5000 21-30 4B, Arnegard, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	23775	29199
7-2025	22463	25838
6-2025	16646	19179
5-2025	22200	25987
4-2025	17342	18330

• 40980, conf, Hess, EN-Starla-157-93-0904H-3, Sorkness, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	13687	0
7-2025	17212	25062
6-2025	15135	12151
5-2025	11157	13306
4-2025	17004	22451

• 41557, conf, CLR, Kanyer 615H, Grinnell, npd, 
• 41556, conf,  CLR, Kanyer 5-15H, Grinnell, npd, 
• 40932, conf, Grayson Mill, Falcon 25-27F 1H, Sixmile,

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	0	20137
7-2025	26481	21620
6-2025	32403	24366
5-2025	20217	15585
4-2025	35224	17660

• 40880, conf, Oasis, Bitterroot 5000 21-30 3B, Arnegard,

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	23169	29731
7-2025	26474	32500
6-2025	24157	27461
5-2025	27586	32144
4-2025	22250	24142

• 22586, conf, Grayson Mill, Bratcher 10-3 4H, Ragged Butte, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	0	41908
7-2025	17924	30550
6-2025	7678	7306
5-2025	8965	6634

• 41375, conf, CLR, Bismarck 9-9H, Brooklyn, 

Date	Oil Runs	MCF Sold
8-2025	7778	32163

I Really Don't Know What To Make Of This -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49295INV. 

Updates

October 5, 2025, Sunday night, futures:

Original Post 

Link here. 

"A pullback is coming." That's the headline? LOL.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

Stargate Data Center -- October 5, 2025

Locator: 49294STARGATE. 

I have five grandchildren. My hunch: each of them, within ten years, could be millionaires, starting with $100,000 today by each building a single-stock portfolio based on information from this article, link here.

Data points, Stargate Data Center, Abilene, Texas:

• one "building" has been completed, operational; seven more buildings under construction
• site footprint: 1,100 acres 
• average footprint of each building with associated parking / road / cement foundation: 140 acres
• atypical, but the absolutely largest Walmart with parking lot: 44 acres
• length of fiberoptic cable that will be needed: enough to wrap around the Earth 16 times
• so far: small fraction of what this site will be and even when complete will still not be enough to serve even the demand of just ChatGPT
• partners: OpenAI, Oracle, SofBank
• five new data centers:
• Shackelford County, Texas
• Milam County, Texas
• Lordstown, Ohio
• Ana County, New Mexico (essentially Texas)
• yet undisclosed, a fifth site in the Midwest 
• Texas is ground-zero for AI
• #1 requirement: abundant, low-cost energy
• Abilene: three hours west of Dallas
• helicopter: two hours?
• during height of construction: 6,400 workers, daily
• once completed: 1,700 jobs on site
• entire project should be completed in about a full year
• $1 billion projected economic benefit, direct and indirect, to Abilene 

The cost for the infrastructure of the Stargate data center in Abilene, Texas, was initially reported to be around $1.1 billion, though the full project cost is expected to be much higher as it includes the installation of massive amounts of computing hardware. Developer Crusoe estimates the total build cost could reach as high as $12 billion, with billions more for the Nvidia chips.

The Stargate data center campus in Abilene, Texas, will have a total power capacity of

1.2 gigawatts (GW) once fully built. This is part of the larger, multi-site Stargate project, which has a total planned capacity of nearly 7 GW across the United States. 

At maximum efficiency: 1.2 GW might power 1.2 million US homes.  

Crusoe's role in the Stargate project:

• Rapid construction: Crusoe has earned recognition for its velocity and efficiency in building AI data centers. The first two 100-megawatt buildings of the Abilene campus were constructed in about 300 days.
• Vertical integration: The company's in-house capabilities for power and construction allow it to control project timelines and accelerate deployment.
• Strategic partnerships: Although the end user is OpenAI, Crusoe is working directly with Oracle, which is the cloud infrastructure partner for the Abilene site.
• Focus on sustainable energy: Crusoe's approach involves securing clean and cost-effective energy for its data centers. The Abilene facility uses the region's abundant wind energy and features advanced cooling systems

 The Stargate Abilene campus

• Operational and expanding: The first phase of the Abilene campus officially went live in September 2025. Construction on the second phase began in March 2025 and is projected to be completed by mid-2026.
• Scale: The full campus is planned to have eight buildings and a total capacity of 1.2 gigawatts.
• High-performance design: The purpose-built facilities are optimized for high-energy-density AI hardware, with features like direct liquid-to-chip cooling to support thousands of GPUs. 

Crusoe's evolution

Originally known as Crusoe Energy Systems, the company first gained attention for its "Digital Flare Mitigation" technology, which converted flared natural gas into energy for cryptocurrency mining. In early 2025, Crusoe shifted its focus entirely to AI, selling its bitcoin mining unit to concentrate on building AI cloud infrastructure and data centers. This pivot has led to Crusoe becoming a key player in the development of AI infrastructure, culminating in its role with the massive Stargate initiative.

 

Crusoe is not yet publicly traded, but there is talk of an IPO.

The company Crusoe gets its name from the fictional character Robinson Crusoe

. Co-founders Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness chose the name to symbolize resourcefulness and creativity in utilizing scarce or wasted resources.

The founders' reasoning links back to their business model:

• Wasted energy: The company's origin involved capturing flared natural gas from oil fields—a wasted resource—and converting it into energy to power computer systems.
• Stranded energy: They also focus on "stranded energy," or power that is remote from a typical grid, and put it to use.
• Resourcefulness: This practice of innovating with what is available parallels Robinson Crusoe's story of being marooned and using his resourcefulness to survive.

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OpenAI's Infrastructure Map

Link here. 

Pet Peeve: The Dot-Com Meme -- October 6, 2025

Locator: 49293DOTCOM. 

Ten largest failures from the dot-com bust:

• Webvan
• Pets.com
• Boo.com
•  GovWorks
• DrKoop.com
• TheGlobe.com
• Value America
• Excite (or eXcite)
• eToys.com 

Ten largest successes coming out of the dot-com bust, and approximate return since 2000:

• Amazon: 5,358%
• eBay
• Apple: 32,535%
• Nvidia
• Oracle
• Microsoft
• intel
• Cisco Systems
• Booking Holdings (formerly Priceline.com)
• Yahoo