Fusion startups are inking defense-related deals, reigniting the relationship between fusion and national security that might have gone dormant, but never completely disappeared.

Some interesting quotes from Core Scientific $CORZ Co-Founder and CDO Russell Cann at the H.C. Wainwright conference earlier this week.. - On liquid vs air cooling: "Direct liquid cool and air cool were just not the same thing. The legacy data centers we had that were air cooled, it just made no sense to try to convert those. We had to build everything from the ground up." - On trends in $/MW CapEx costs: "The first deals.. late in 2023, we had good hard estimates of around $4.5MM a megawatt.. By the time we got around to inking the deal in June, that same facility was just under $8MM a megawatt. Now, the things that we actually turned on this year, the other sites, they were floating around $10MM to $10.5MM a megawatt.. The stuff that we have turning on in 2027.. is between $12MM and $13MM a megwatt. Most of that increase is labor, and then.. the gear, switchgear, the transformers." - On labor constraints: "If you have a kid graduating high school right now, they need to go become an electrician. Journeyman electricians right now on one of our sites make about $250k - $350k a year, and master electricians are bringing in $750k a year." - On AMD's expansion option: "We agreed to give them the next 2,000MW at three of our sites in Hunt County, TX, Pecos, TX, and Muskogee, OK.. I would say unless the market just really goes south, AMD will take all 2,000 of those MWs. They have already announced who their customers are, so you guys can figure it out."

Inkling from @thinkymachines is live on OpenRouter. An open-weights MoE model with 975B total / 41B active parameters, 1M context, and controllable reasoning across text, images, and audio. Try it:

Inkling running on a DGX B200 node with vLLM across 8 GPUs. Text, images, and reasoning from a single container. Red Hat AI FP8 checkpoints coming soon. Shoutout to the @vllm_project community for getting this up and running and @_soyr_ for the quick video.