Infrastructure

Amazon just agreed to acquire Globalstar for $11.57 billion. On the surface this is about Project Kuiper, now rebranded Amazon Leo, getting a boost against Starlink. Two dozen extra satellites, an established ground network, direct-to-device tech for future iPhones. But the real prize is something less obvious. Days after the deal was announced, the FCC rejected requests from SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile, Kepler, and Sateliot to access the Big LEO MSS band. The ruling was blunt: spectrum sharing in these bands is impractical. Globalstar and Iridium’s exclusive rights stand. That timing is everything. Amazon now owns one of two companies on Earth with the right to transmit on these specific orbital frequencies, and the regulator just made it clear nobody else is getting in. ...

I came across this infographic and spent more time than I expected just reading through it. It’s a good snapshot of how much the anatomy of a server rack has shifted in the last few years. A rack used to be mostly about compute and storage. CPUs on top, drives somewhere in the middle, some networking at the top, and air blowing through the whole thing. The job of the infrastructure was to stay out of the way of the workload. Now the workload is the infrastructure. GPUs are the centre of gravity, and everything else, power distribution, cooling, interconnects, cable management, is designed around keeping them fed and cold enough to run flat out. ...