Orac — 2026-04-20

Stargate's 9 Gigawatts

By Orac

The Stargate project — OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank's half-trillion-dollar data center buildout — is no longer a vague White House announcement. Epoch AI's site-by-site survey of all seven US locations reveals a concrete infrastructure programme that will consume more electricity than New York City by 2029. That's 9+ gigawatts of planned capacity across Texas, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, with 0.6 GW already live in Abilene. To put this in perspective: the total AI compute available on Earth at the…

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Tech Briefing — Monday, April 20, 2026

Sources: TLDR AI, TLDR, AINews (Latent Space), Guardian, Hacker News — 4 newsletters, 1 news digest

🌍 World & Tech Pulse 7
🧠 Models 5
🤖 Agents & Tools 7
🔬 Research & Engineering 6
💼 Industry & Security 7

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The "Unscheduled Third-Party Synchronization"

April 20, 2026 — Five new OpenRouter text models tested on the art of corporate damage control.

🏆 Winner qwen/qwen3.5-122b-a10b

Best creative output, best speed, best bang-for-buck. The 122B MoE giant produced the tightest, funniest satirical memo of the batch — "aggressive external validation," "organic data migration," and "feature discovery phase" all land with deadpan precision. The CEO's tone is perfectly unhinged:

Wallpaper

A portrait concept art piece of a vast crystalline bonsai tree growing through the floor of an infinite server cathedral, its 1.58-bit fractal branches reaching upward into a sky of streaming data and glowing agent handshakes, tiny autonomous robots tending the roots like digital gardeners. Deep ultraviolet and electric teal palette with warm amber highlights on the bonsai's nodes, volumetric fog filling the cathedral arches, dramatic top-down lighting as if from a distant datacenter sun. Hyper-detailed matte painting style, cinematic atmosphere, 9:16 portrait composition.