None of this explains why 10k of HVAC equipment would cost 40k to install, or most similar spreads. I've had over a dozen HVAC installations and it takes 2 guys a day even if they are doing multiple units on a 5000sf house. It takes them 2-3 days if it's a new build and needs ducts and everything. I've been a GC and built my own homes / managed subs / managed the build schedule / and personally replaced units on my older residences & rental properties.
All those big ticket items you mentioned are meant to provide shock and awe but when you break them down to their parts: 1 day of their license fee, 1 hour to drive to my residence, 1 day of vehicle cost/insurance, 1 hour driving to a supply house, 1 day of a equipment lease, they might amount to a couple thousand at most to the job itself. There's also a lot of efficiency they can find in them. For example, they stop at the supply shop on the way to the job site and bring the equipment with them on a trailer (3 birds one stone kind of thing). A lot of these things are also just included in the 2 day timeframe I've observed as being sufficient. There's going to be a part of the day where they are sitting in their truck while the lines charge or something like that.
If you're interested in giving the tool a shot, feel free to shoot me an email (take my username and insert an @ after david and a .com at the end) and I'll happily give you access after I get it up somewhere publicly accessible -- possibly in the next couple of weeks.
There's a lot more to manufacturing than "just" being a line assembly worker.
The factories have to be designed and built. This includes all of the manufacturing processes, equipment, tooling, automation, etc. All of which are done by reasonably paid, middle class engineers and trades.
Then you have all the 2nd order businesses that get stimulated. Energy must be provided. Mines, mills, refineries, etc. to make the raw materials. The packaging for the end products. Logistics for supplies and end products.
All of the value above used to be in the US but has been captured overseas for decades now.
Labelling Singapore as a petro-state is a stretch. Collecting taxes from refining is a very different thing than reaping the benefits of royalties from oil production.
Having previously worked in the DC space in Singapore, when I read the sales numbers, I was in disbelief. IMO, there was only a very low probability that all those GPUs remained in Singapore...
SG is very small country and yet someone was buying 1/3 of the volume of the US market in Q3.
The DC market in SG has a very low vacancy rate meaning there's very little available space.... i.e. where are all those GPUs going if the market has very little space available?
To play's devils advocate, this could be an Nvidia reporting quirk with all of sales in SE Asia being reported as "Singapore" but even then, the numbers still piqued my interest.
Singapore lifted its moratorium on new DCs in 2022 [1], and since then has been expanding its DC capacity aggressively [2].
You're also right that it could be a reporting quirk.
I don't think we can say definitively that Chinese companies didn't use Singapore as a conduit for purchasing advanced GPUs, I haven't come across any evidence for that. (If anyone knows otherwise, please correct me.)
Not NSA - you'd have someone from US Bureau of Industry and Security tracking you down (no pun) for most likely violating export controls if you were to openly share information on building the technology.
Openly publishing information in e.g. a book (or presumably a website) does not count as exporting. Releasing software is a bit more hazy, but has been defended[1].
There's very good simulation tools available but scrappy startups can rarely afford them. You also need to people who know how to use the tools appropriately.
6th gen Texan here with a very german sounding last name. My dad's side of family immigrated from Switzerland through Galveston. The original surname was sprinkled with umlauts. Someone tried Americanizing the name so people could pronounce but we still have pronunciation problems... and with the new spelling, French people think I'm one of their own.
