Introduction
Welcome back to Laboratory, the weekly dispatch where we peel back the polished veneer of Big Tech and sift through the solder, sweat, and scramble underneath. This week our lens swings toward Meta’s secret city of tents—makeshift GPU cathedrals rising faster than you can say “H100 shortage”—and the billion‑dollar talent raid powering them. The source of this article is an impressive article published the 11th of July by SemiAnalysis “Meta Superintelligence – Leadership Compute, Talent, and Data,”. Buckle up, because in today’s flight plan you’ll encounter:
Silicon in Canvas: Why Mark Zuckerberg dumped glass‑walled data temples for pop‑up camps that can spin up a teraflop festival overnight.
The $200‑Million Brain Drain: How nine‑figure signing bonuses are ripping star researchers out of rival labs and rewiring the pecking order of AI talent.
Prometheus & Hyperion: Inside the 1‑to‑2‑gigawatt clusters drinking straight from on‑site gas plants—and what that means for carbon math, grid politics, and model velocity.
Strap in as we unroll this canvas empire, showing builders, investors, and policy hawks why the race to superintelligence might be decided not in sleek server farms but in GPU‑stuffed tents and balance sheets set on fire.
