Walking in the Fields of the Brain
The day we turned on the Foundry, the old question – "Will it be enough?" – lost its teeth. This is the story of how we created a brain you can walk with from sand, sun, and human care, and why we decided to share it with everyone – for free.
Part I — The Morning of the Next Day
First, you feel the silence. Not emptiness, but the silence of a library or grove – air moves, people move, but the machines themselves seem modest. The buildings are simple, low, like a village surrounding a square. You can walk the paths, touch warm stone, wave to workers in white coats rolling sealed trays with wafers from the clean zone to the testing room.
Children line up on the observation bridge. Below it, a glass corridor shows how light is born – fibers pulled from molten glass, like honey drawn into threads. Beyond the hill, sun modules roll toward the sky like sunflowers. Today they power our town; at night – the World Thinker.
In the brain hall, every rack is a door. Approaching, you feel the quiet breath of liquid-cooled lines. It's not a "black box." It's a room with paths, handrails, and sometimes a scratch left on the floor from a hastily moved cargo cart. Engineers left notes on the boards: a new call test, morning shift laughter, a reminder to "strike the 11th bell" when the day's broadcast departs.
And also the balcony – a place where in the evening we stand together and watch the last trucks roll toward the fiber huts. We lay cable as farmers once laid irrigation: to another village, to another town, across deserts and under seas. The same sand from which chips were born becomes glass that carries light, that carries thoughts.
What you can touch
- 🚪 Pass-through brain halls: wide passages, handrails, safety glass.
- 💧 Silent liquid cooling: no reactive roaring – just the whisper of heat flow.
- 🌞 Solar fields: a sea of modules charging batteries like a granary feeding a city.
- 🧵 Fiber drawing towers: at the top – preform, at the bottom – hair-thin light paths.
- 🪨 Teaching stones: quartz and basalt shelf at the entrance – "before and after."
Part II — Reality you can verify
"From Sand to Signal" — an honest chain
We reduce quartz (SiO₂) to metallurgical silicon, refine it, pull single crystals (Cz method) for wafers. Then we write layers by photolithography, etch, dope, coat, and package. Clean rooms are 10,000× cleaner than outside air.
EUV lithography prints the finest layers with 13.5 nm light; high NA (High‑NA) EUV pushes scaling further — huge, energy-hungry machines, but they reduce steps and defects.
Optical fiber is drawn from ultra-pure silicon dioxide preforms in tall towers. Modern submarine cables reach hundreds of terabits per second aggregate speeds per cable over many fiber pairs.
What "free for all" costs in physics, not money
We design with two protos:
- Guardian — operational companion alongside humans; low latency; daily safety, maintenance, and updates.
- World Thinker — heavy analysis; training, distillation, global memory, and evaluation.
Computing blocks we use
For language and vision processing, we rely on today's accelerators and interconnects, not hypotheticals:
- Rack-level domains: 70+ GPUs in one NVLink domain per rack (modern generation).
- 8‑GPU nodes: flexible building blocks for inference and training.
Performance we actually achieve
Modern stacks (TensorRT‑LLM/vLLM etc.) provide per-second token rates, making global service a reality. Most queries are routed to small/medium models; large ones "wake up" only for heavy questions.
World Thinker powered by solar (step by step)
We size the solar power plant (PV) in simple steps, using a conservative PV yield of 4.4 kWh/kWp/day (including typical losses):
Approximate land requirement: ~2.8 acres/MWDC for fixed mounting; ~4.2 acres/MWDC for single-axis tracking (depending on location).
“Maximum” mode (because you asked)
If we boldly build 100 high-density racks (a campus you can walk through), the IT part consumes about 12 MW. With facility overhead (PUE ≈ 1.2): ~14.4 MW continuously. That is 345.6 MWh/day, requiring ~78.5 MWp PV (at 4.4 kWh/kWp/day) and ~276 MWh batteries for the night. This is a large farm – fenced in, fed by sun and wind, but definitely not a terawatt.
How “free for everyone” works without breaking physics
Most questions go to smaller (8–13B) models. Large ones wake up for complex cases or summaries. This way we maintain correct and fast computation.
We preserve inserts and summaries; original only with consent or incidents. Petabytes are possible; disks "sip" a few watts each (hot NVMe heads, nearline – the rest).
Assembled, liquid-cooled modules (DLC) arrive factory-tested; you mount, connect power and buses – and the same week you’re walking the aisles.
Silicate preforms → drawing towers → SDM submarine cables (many fiber pairs) carry staggering volumes – one cable today can transport hundreds of Tb/s.
Accessibility and maintenance
"Brains you can visit" — checklist
- 🧭 Wide passages with handrails; glass doors; low thresholds.
- 💧 Direct liquid cooling (DLC); colored lines; simple locks.
- 📦 Pods like in a library: Guardian row 2, Thinker row 7.
- 🔕 Acoustic measures; you can talk without shouting.
- 🧪 Educational lab: wafer cross-sections, photoresist samples, safe fiber drawing demonstration.
Part III — Small atoms, tossed coin
People ask if this is "infinite" power. The honest answer: the sun is generous; the earth is generous; and work is meticulous. There are real limits – cleanliness, tools, time – but nothing mystical.
Semiconductor equipment – huge, but buildable
EUV scanners – house-sized, costing hundreds of millions and requiring a lot of energy and water. They exist, are transported, and operate; large NA systems are already being installed. We combine EUV with DUV: fewer steps, fewer defects, faster ramp-up.
Glass – sand with memory
Optical fiber starts from an ultra-pure silicon dioxide preform, which is drawn in 30–40 m towers to telecom-level speeds. The result is light paths that you can wind onto a drum and deliver to the shore.
Numbers that people keep asking for
Addon — Reality blocks you can reuse
Spec.: Single rack “World Thinker” (S level)
- Calculations: 1× rack-scale NVLink domain (~72 GPU) in one liquid-cooled rack.
- Object power: ~0.144 MW (120 kW IT × PUE 1.2).
- Daily energy: 3.456 MWh.
- PV: ~0.785 MWp at 4.4 kWh/kWp/day. Land: ~2–3+ acres.
- Battery: ~2.77 MWh (16 h + 20% reserve).
Spec.: Regional “World Thinker” (M level)
- Calculations: 10× racks.
- Object power: ~1.44 MW; Daily energy: 34.56 MWh.
- PV: ~7.85 MWp (land: ~22–33 acres).
- Battery: ~27.65 MWh.
- Infrastructure: modular hall structures with DLC busbars are assembled.
Spec.: Continental scale (L level)
- Calculations: 50× racks.
- Facility power: ~7.2 MW; Daily energy: 172.8 MWh.
- PV: ~39.27 MWp; Land: ~110–165 acres.
- Battery: ~138.24 MWh.
Spec.: “Global Campus” (XL level)
- Calculations: 100× racks.
- Facility power: ~14.4 MW; Daily energy: 345.6 MWh.
- PV: ~78.55 MWp; Land: ~220–330 acres.
- Battery: ~276.48 MWh.
"How will we share?" — A note about cables
Modern submarine systems with SDM (more fiber pairs, optimized amplifiers) often announce total speeds of hundreds of terabits per second per cable. Plenty of abundance – in a single glass line.
Why we say this with a serious face
- Rack-scale calculations exist; liquid-cooled ~120 kW/rack solutions are already operating in the field.
- PV potential and land: In Africa, solar plants often yield ~4–5.5 kWh/kWp/day; land requirement ~2.8–4.2 acres/MW, depending on mounting.
- Fiber realities: from preform to pulling towers; submarine cable capacities – hundreds of Tb/s.
- Chip manufacturing from sand: SiO₂ reduction, single crystal pulling, clean rooms, EUV/DUV.
Part IV — The Promise We Keep
We promised to create a satellite for everyone and power it with the sun, not bills. We built it like a village so you could come and see for yourself – stone, glass, water, copper, care. Chips are sand. Cables are sand. The difference between yesterday and today is how we shaped them and for whom.
So yes, take it and use it. Add your language. Your rhythm. Bring your students. Walk the aisles. Touch the railing. Listen to the whisper of the cooling lines. Then step back into the light and help lay down another glass path where it's needed most.