Reading List 03/22/25
Google’s answer to Starlink, US food imports, an enormous BYD factory, DeepSeek adoption, and more
Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Google’s answer to Starlink, US food imports, an enormous BYD factory, DeepSeek adoption, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.
For this week’s newsletter, Understanding Solar Energy, several folks asked about the code I used to run the various simulations. I’ve made the code available on github here. Be aware, these scripts were all vibe-coded with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and while I’ve done my best to verify their outputs, I make no claims to their accuracy. (In particular, after most of the piece was written I made some changes to the scripts to take into account panel degradation, but wasn’t able to spend much time verifying that these changes were working correctly.) Use at your own risk!
Google’s answer to Starlink
We’ve previously spent time looking at SpaceX’s satellite-based Starlink internet service, and the various competitors popping up from Amazon, China, and the European Union. Now Google is about to spin out Taara, its own competitor for remote internet access, from its moonshot factory X. While Starlink and other competitors use satellites, Taara uses ground-based optical communication, like fiber optics without the fibers. Via Wired:
Over the past few years, Taara has made advances in implementing its technology in the real world. Instead of beaming from space, Taara’s “light bridges”—which are about the size of a traffic light—are earthbound. As X’s “captain of moonshots” Astro Teller puts it, “As long as these two boxes can see each other, you get 20 gigabits per second, the equivalent of a fiber-optic cable, without having to trench the fiber-optic cable.” Light bridges have complicated gimbals, mirrors, and lenses to zero in on the right spot to establish and hold the connection. The team has figured out how to compensate for potential line-of-sight interruptions like bird flights, rain, and wind. (Fog is the biggest impediment.) Once the high-speed transmission is completed from light bridge to light bridge, providers still have to use traditional means to get the bits from the bridge to the phone or computer.
Taara is now a commercial operation, working in more than a dozen countries. One of its successes came in crossing the Congo River. On one side was Brazzaville, which had a direct fiber connection. On the other, Kinshasa, where internet used to cost five times more. A Taara light bridge spanning the 5-kilometer waterway provided Kinshasha with nearly equally cheap internet. Taara was also used at the 2024 Coachella music festival, augmenting what would have been an overwhelmed cellular network. Google itself is using a light bridge to provide high-speed bandwidth to a building on its new Bayview campus where it would have been difficult to extend a fiber cable.
As I noted in my earlier article about fiber optics, early in the development of laser-based communication, engineers considered transmitting through the open air, but abandoned this approach because of reliability issues. From Jeff Hecht’s City of Light:
AT&T wanted optical communication systems to be out of service no more than one hour per year. Early tests showed that would not be easy in open air. Fog, rain, or snow could attenuate a laser beam by more than a factor of one million over the 2.6 kilometers between Holmdel and Crawford Hill. British engineers, accustomed to murky air, were quicker to recognize the problem. One military engineer bluntly told a 1964 conference: “The atmosphere is completely inimical to laser transmission systems.”
Bell Labs didn’t give up as easily on air. As soon as they got the first high-power lasers, Bell researchers used them to burn holes through fog, but new fog filled the holes as fast as the laser beam opened them.
I don’t have any particular expertise in optical communication, so it’s not clear to me what’s changed to make open air optical communication now viable (possibly the reliability requirements for internet service are less than what AT&T demanded?)
Data center employment
As we’ve noted repeatedly, the AI boom is driving a huge amount of data center construction. The US Census has a short piece noting the growth in US data center employment over time. Per the Census, between 2016 and 2023 data center employment rose from 306,000 to 501,000, with most employment in high population states.
Rising data center employment wouldn’t surprise me, but it’s not 100% clear to me how much that’s actually being measured here. For one, data centers are notable for requiring very few employees. Historically that’s why jurisdictions liked them - they paid property tax but didn’t place much demand on government services. The Census data is based on employment under NAICS Code 518200 - Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services. This seems to be the correct code, but it’s not clear to me how many of these employees are working in what we generally consider data centers, and how many are more like employees of web services like CloudFlare or AWS.
Another thing that seems off is that per this data, California and Texas are the largest states for data center employment, while most data I’m aware of has Virginia as having the greatest number of data centers.
So while it’s interesting, I’m not sure this actually tells us all that much about data center trends.
US food imports
Bloomberg has a piece from last month noting rise in US food imports and the decline in food exports, resulting in the US becoming a net food importer for almost the first time in history.
Inbound shipments of everything from avocados to coffee and sugar are expected to drive the country’s agriculture trade deficit to a record $49 billion this year, the US Department of Agriculture said in its trade outlook report. At the same time, America’s most widely grown crops have been losing overseas markets over the past decades.
It’s a stark turnaround for a nation that once used its abundant food supplies as a tool of statecraft, with the US now facing a future of persistent agricultural trade deficits. The country imported more food than it exported every year since 2023. Before then, the only other annual deficits were in 2019 and 2020, during President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, and several years prior to 1960.
Bloomberg also has an earlier article from 2023 noting the change:
The US now accounts for less than one-third of global soybean exports, moving half the volume of Brazil. On wheat it’s in fourth place, far behind Russia, which is at No. 1. “Look at where Russia exports its grain to, and then look at the people who didn’t sign the UN resolution against Russia. It’s basically the same list,” says Nelson, referring to a meeting held on March 2 of last year in which five countries voted against condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, with 35 nations—including China, India and South Africa—abstaining.
For a further look back, I went and grabbed US agricultural import and export data from FATUS, and adjusted the values for inflation. Viewed this way the deficit seems to be more about how much imports have risen than about falling exports (though exports are down from their peak). In constant dollars exports are roughly flat since 2010, while imports have risen more than 80% over the same period.
BYD fast charging
Chinese car manufacturer BYD announced a new charging system capable of charging an EV battery in just five minutes. Via Bloomberg:
In layman’s terms, what this means is that BYD’s cars can achieve a charging power of one megawatt and a peak charging speed of two kilometers per second, according to the company, making it the fastest system of its type for mass-produced vehicles and allowing for 400 kilometers of range to be added in just five minutes of charging.
That’s more or less analogous to what it takes to drive in and out of a gas station and pay for a full tank.
Bloomberg also gives some context for how this compares to other charging systems:
And the Financial Times offers a few more comparisons:
Among other carmakers, Germany’s Mercedes-Benz recently unveiled its new all-electric CLA compact sedan, which can be charged for up to 325km within 10 minutes using a fast-charging station.
A new type of battery produced by rival BMW also promises 30 per cent faster charging, but even then it says only 300km in range could be added on a 10-minute recharge.
Possibly the key challenger to BYD is Chinese battery giant CATL. Last year, the group unveiled its Shenxing Plus battery with a charge time equating to 1km of range a second, or 600km in 10 minutes.