2 min read · no prior knowledge needed
How to read this site
What the columns mean, what the three evidence states are, and which numbers are measurements rather than judgements. Five minutes, and the rest of the site opens up.
This site maps the things that have to exist before more compute, more power and more machines can be built. Most of it is tables. This page explains how to read one.
Start with one idea
Progress is set by the slowest input you cannot substitute. Not the most expensive input, and not the one in the headlines. If a data centre can be designed in months and financed in weeks but cannot be connected to the electricity grid for four years, the grid connection is the speed of the whole thing. Everything faster than that is, for now, free.
So the question this site asks about every row is narrow: is this the thing that is actually holding others up, and how would you know?
The three states of evidence
Every row is in one of three states, and the site shows which on the row itself. This matters more than anything else here.
- Verified. A person opened a source that says so, and the link is on the page. Only these are findings.
- Source found. Software located a page that appears to say so, and nobody has read it yet. Useful, not a finding.
- Unverified. Neither. Usually a lead from trade knowledge that is probably right and has not been checked.
The front page prints how many maker rows are sourced as a fraction rather than rounding it up. A site like this is only worth reading if it is honest about what it has not checked.
Which numbers are judgements
Two numbers look like measurements and are not.
Severity, 0 to 12, is four questions scored by hand: how few suppliers qualify, how hard it would be to replace, how long new capacity takes, and whether the buyer can walk away at any price. It carries the date it was judged and a sentence explaining the call, so you can disagree with it.
Readiness, 1 to 9 in the Science section, is the same kind of thing for how close a technology is to being usable at scale.
Both are arguments. Neither is a measurement, and every page that shows one says so.
What the sections are for
| Section | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Bottlenecks | What is holding things up, and how hard |
| Markets | Who actually makes it, and how replaceable they are |
| Policy | Which rules slow or speed it, and who asked for them |
| Science | What would remove it, and how far off that is |
| Capital | Who could fund relief — and whether money is even the problem |
| Calls | What we have predicted, with what would prove us wrong |
The one habit worth having
When you read that something is a shortage, ask what the binding step is. Very often it is not the mine, or the factory everyone names, but a purification or qualification step one layer below, done by three companies nobody writes about. That layer is what this site is trying to make visible.