The Cognitive Revolution · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Jeremy and Ed Harris discuss potential verification mechanisms for US-China AI cooperation, suggesting that monitoring data center energy footprints could be a starting point. They note that large data centers have significant thermal signatures, which are difficult to hide, and that improving verification technologies could save billions.
“Data centers put off a hell of an energy footprint. You know, the thermals on those are really, really bright. Data centers are huge. They haven't by and large yet been built to be hidden, and it takes a long time to build data centers.”
“So help me God if I see a cluster and that cluster is yay big, you know That's like the kind of conversation you're looking at and how you quantify that is a matter of you know The sort of national technical means that the US currently has”
“But we have to see the heat signatures from this, like go away. So if there is a running cluster above a certain size, and that is to be clear, a tremendously expensive ask in either direction, the the depreciation on GPUs is is the major part of the OPEX cost.”