Romania’s new data centre for ‘AI and quantum’
Romanian Senate president Mircea Abrudean put out a press release in May promoting “the first data centre in the world with quantum artificial intelligence”! [press release, in Romanian] The developer, US company DriverAI, is talking up an 80 megawatt facility. The data centre will apparently…
Romanian Senate president Mircea Abrudean put out a press release in May promoting “the first data centre in the world with quantum artificial intelligence”! [press release, in Romanian] The developer, US company DriverAI, is talking up an 80 megawatt facility. The data centre will apparently combine high-density GPU computing with quantum computing, for unclear reasons. It’ll be built in an industrial park in Luna, a village in Romania near the city of Cluj. It’ll be a $1 billion investment, which is the bit the Senator really cares about. This s a great plan, and the bit where it makes no sense is a minor detail. The Romanian press started digging. DriverAI’s slogan is “The Future of In-Store Intelligence”. What they do is they sell retail shopping apps with computer vision for retailers. They’ve been registered as a company since July 2024. They have no history in data centres. [Ziarul Financiar, in Romanian] The land DriverAI wants to build on is 50 metres from the Arieș river, which DriverAI says it totally won’t use for cooling the data centre. They’ll absolutely use closed-loop cooling instead. [PressOne, in Romanian] DriverAI told PressOne it would be building the data centre underground! And the cool earth would be enough to pipe away the 80 MW of heat. PressOne had to point out this contradicts physics. Rocks are insulators for heat, not conductors, and you can’t pump 80 megawatts into the ground and not have it just heat up. I’ll go so far as to say that if this thing ever gets built, DriverAI will definitely tap into that handy river just nearby. Also, the land that DriverAI wants to build on is in dispute. A company renting land nearby has asked the Luna government to annul ceding the land to the Leviatan industrial park and DriverAI. Nothing DriverAI claims concerning this alleged project can be verified independently. There’s no information on who the investors will be. Nobody DriverAI names in its press release has a billion dollars handy. [DriverAI, PDF] One minor detail is the bit where quantum computing doesn’t exist yet. It’s not a product you can buy for a data centre. It’s a science experiment on a lab bench. There’s a lot of venture capital that really wants quantum computing to be a product — but back here in reality, it just isn’t one. It’s not clear what’s going on here. DriverAI is a tiny company trying to pivot in one shot to being a big company. We could guess that DriverAI is selling an AI data centre pitch to the AI vendors to build outside the US. That might get them a billion dollars. The planned location is also just two kilometres from Romanian Airbase 71, which runs as part of NATO, and militaries are great customers to have. The quantum bit is DriverAI saying, we’ll do magic. Even more magic. So give us the money. And just a bit of government funding would be lovely, thank you. Maybe they’ll pump the heat out with quantum. Video — PodcastSource: Pivot to AI — Published — Category: Business