Cassidy: Meta's building enough compute to power a small country, and Zuckerberg's now wondering out loud whether to sell some of it.
Cassidy: That's new. Here's how we got here.
Cassidy: NAVER, NVIDIA, and Brookfield were already tied to a reported $10 billion push to take South Korea's national AI factory to 200 megawatts.
Cassidy: The question all along was whether the financing
Cassidy: chips and power would turn that announced scale into capacity people could actually deploy.
Cassidy: Until now, 200 megawatts was the near-term benchmark for the whole project.
Bill: This is AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Gigawatt campuses are going up on three continents, and one financier's name keeps showing up.
Bill: A preprint dropped yesterday that quietly undercuts the whole spending spree.
Bill: Let's start with Meta.
Cassidy: From Jonathan Vanian at CNBC:
Quote: Among the four major U.S. hyperscalers
Quote: Meta is the only one that doesn't have a business selling cloud infrastructure and services even though its capital expenditures rival that
Quote: of its peers. But in recent months
Quote: Zuckerberg has been floating the possibility of launching a cloud business as a way to take advantage of its capacity stockpile in a
Quote: resource-constrained market.
Cassidy: Meta's the odd one out here.
Cassidy: It's the only one of the four hyperscalers without a cloud business to justify capex that rivals Amazon and Microsoft.
Cassidy: Now Zuckerberg's openly floating one on the earnings call.
Bill: The honest part is Zuckerberg's line: "How much do you monetize something today versus develop future assets."
Bill: Every hyperscaler has that argument in private.
Bill: Zuckerberg just said it out loud.
Cassidy: It's the same pressure that pushed Nvidia from chip supplier toward landlord.
Cassidy: Anyone sitting on compute ends up with the same choice: sell it or hoard it.
Bill: But look at the price of that dilemma: free cash flow down ninety percent year over year, the stock off seven after hours.
Bill: Zuckerberg says he's getting offers at a "significant premium" over what he paid.
Bill: Fine, Anthropic's reportedly in line to lease some of that capacity.
Bill: But he can't sell the racks he needs to keep Llama competitive, and that's the trade-off he can't hedge.
Cassidy: Right.
Cassidy: He's never sold a day of cloud service, and the market just docked him eleven percent for the year while he figures out whether to start.
Cassidy: Here's Construction Review Online:
Quote: A coalition led by Brookfield and NextEra Energy has unveiled plans to develop a $100 billion artificial intelligence data center campus at
Quote: the U.S. Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in western Kentucky
Quote: transforming part of the former uranium enrichment complex into one of the largest AI infrastructure developments ever proposed in the
Quote: United States.
Bill: Okay here's the number that grounds this one: 4.6 gigawatts of new generation built exclusively for the campus—2 gigs of gas and 2.6 gigs of
Bill: battery storage. NextEra owns and builds the power; Brookfield runs the compute.
Bill: There's an actual site and a real generation plan, with partners attached.
Bill: That's more than we've gotten from most announcements this week.
Cassidy: And it sharpens the question I keep circling.
Cassidy: This is private money on a Department of Energy site—a former uranium enrichment complex on federal land.
Cassidy: So if it goes sideways in 2032, whose exposure is it, exactly?
Cassidy: And look who's leading the coalition: Brookfield.
Cassidy: It's the same financial firm that surfaces whenever somebody announces a continent-sized build this week.
Cassidy: It's quietly becoming the counterparty to an awful lot of concrete.
Bill: Zuckerberg just spent his earnings call agonizing over how much capacity to sell and how much to keep.
Bill: Meanwhile, here's a $100 billion campus promising 1.2 gigawatts of compute by 2032.
Bill: Everyone's pouring foundations against projections nobody's stress-tested.
Cassidy: And they made a point of saying costs won't hit residential ratepayers.
Cassidy: Which is the kind of sentence you only write when someone's already asked the question.
Cassidy: Converge Digest writes:
Quote: NAVER
Quote: NVIDIA and Brookfield announced plans to expand Korea’s sovereign AI infrastructure by growing the initial NVIDIA DSX AI factory deployment
Quote: at NAVER’s GAK Sejong hyperscale data center from 55 MW to 200 MW by 2028.
Quote: The project represents the next phase of a broader roadmap in which NAVER intends to deploy up to 1 GW of AI infrastructure to support
Quote: enterprises government agencies
Quote: startups and AI cloud customers in Korea and internationally.
Cassidy: Today we get the number for NAVER and Nvidia in Korea: the 55-megawatt AI factory scales to 200 by 2028
Cassidy: inside a stated one-gigawatt roadmap.
Cassidy: Nvidia's putting in a billion, Brookfield up to nine billion.
Cassidy: Brookfield keeps popping up.
Cassidy: It backs the Korea build and sits in the Paducah coalition we just covered.
Cassidy: It even threads through the Nebius story coming up.
Cassidy: One balance sheet, three continents of AI concrete.
Bill: The date's the tell for me: 200 megawatts by 2028, on Vera Rubin and Blackwell systems.
Bill: NAVER is standing in the exact same silicon line as everyone else announcing gigawatts this week.
Cassidy: And the announcement came during President Lee's San Francisco visit.
Cassidy: This has government-level sovereign AI backing, well beyond a vendor press release.
Bill: Right, but Nvidia still owns the stack, from multi-tenant operations and lifecycle software to token throughput per megawatt.
Bill: The sovereignty lives in the data center.
Bill: HyperCLOVA X is even rebasing on Nemotron, so a lot rides on one supplier's roadmap actually shipping.
Cassidy: Here's DataMagz:
Quote: AI cloud company Nebius has revealed additional details about its planned hyperscale data center campus in Pennsylvania
Quote: outlining a phased development that could ultimately deliver 1.2 gigawatts (GW) of computing capacity.
Quote: The Nasdaq-listed company is developing the facility in Butler Township
Quote: Schuylkill County within Highridge Business Park
Quote: approximately 55 miles (89 kilometers) west of Allentown.
Bill: So after Paducah and NAVER, here's Nebius in Butler Township.
Bill: The site covers 600 acres and six single-story buildings, with the first 260 megawatts live by October 2027.
Bill: Unlike the coalition deals we just walked through, this one's fully owned and operated by Nebius.
Bill: No Brookfield in the cap table on this one.
Cassidy: Which actually makes it the cleanest data point in the batch.
Cassidy: A Nasdaq-listed cloud company is putting its own name on 1.2 gigawatts
Cassidy: built in phases: 260 in the first phase
Cassidy: 660 by 2029 then more than a gigawatt at full build.
Bill: And notice what the phase-one date does.
Bill: October 2027 for the first 260.
Bill: That's the honest number—everything after that is a projection nobody's stress-tested against the silicon supply.
Cassidy: That's what I've been watching all week.
Cassidy: Everyone's announcing 2029 full-build capacity on paper.
Cassidy: If it doesn't show up on schedule, who takes the hit?
Cassidy: Here, at least, the answer's simple: Nebius.
Bill: And this is a company that just pulled a 775 million dollar debt facility to fund the cloud side.
Bill: So a lot's riding on those phases landing when they say they will.
Cassidy: Yukiyasu Kamitani, Ken Shirakawa, writing in Arxiv:
Quote: Generative AI removes that difficulty, and an old error returns on a scale and at a speed it never had before.
Quote: We locate the problem not in evidence growing weaker but in how surprise is counted.
Bill: Okay, after a week of gigawatts and hundred-billion-dollar campuses, here's the paper nobody at Paducah is reading.
Bill: Kamitani and Shirakawa submitted "Phantom Evidence" to arXiv two days ago.
Bill: Their claim is blunt: higher resolution and greater fluency add zero evidence.
Bill: A prettier, more convincing output still has a hard ceiling on what it can prove.
Bill: Letting the model grade its own homework doesn't raise that ceiling.
Cassidy: They trace it back to Francis Bacon.
Cassidy: Four centuries ago, he warned that looking convincing shouldn't count as evidence.
Cassidy: Generative AI has industrialized that old error.
Cassidy: The timing is almost too on-the-nose.
Cassidy: We just spent this segment on Meta guiding to a hundred-thirty-plus billion in capex and Nebius lighting up 1.2 gigawatts in Pennsylvania
Cassidy: all justified by projections that more compute means better outputs.
Cassidy: This preprint quietly says: measure whether the convincing answer still shows up when the target is absent.
Cassidy: Bacon's table of absence.
Bill: That's the part that keeps me up.
Bill: Nobody signing a 4.6-gigawatt power deal is asking what the extra fluency actually buys in true findings.
Bill: The authors say the fraction of published results that hold up drops right back to where it was before you ran anything.
Cassidy: Building the fastest possible machine for manufacturing false positives.
Cassidy: At scale, on schedule, with a PPL energy agreement attached.
Cassidy: If AI Daily Briefing helps you stay informed, subscribe and leave a review wherever you're listening.
Cassidy: It helps other people find the show, and we really appreciate the support.
Cassidy: We're watching for NAVER's AI agent platform launch in Korea in the second half of this year.
Cassidy: The first 260-megawatt phase of Nebius's Pennsylvania campus is due by October 2027.
Cassidy: Paducah's full AI campus is slated for 2032, with up to 1.8 gigawatts of utility capacity and more than 1.2 gigawatts of computing capacity.
Cassidy: Links to every story are in the show notes if you'd like to dig deeper.
Cassidy: That's AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.