Two senses. In finance, bonds; senior unsecured notes are backed by the company’s general promise to pay rather than by any particular asset. In this book, the Notes at the end of each chapter, keyed to a phrase in the text, each naming its source; the full Note for every citation is kept at dryburgh.com/vol1/notes. Chapter 10; A Note on Sources.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 10 — The Lender’s Decision
Who is lending the money and who bears the loss: the bonds, leases and guarantees behind the largest campuses, and how the paper reaches ordinary retirement accounts.
Where the record uses it
Sources that use it
- Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin Press, 2025), ch. 5 “Scale of Ambition”, ch. 12 “Plundered Earth” and the Epilogue (the Microsoft–OpenAI supercomputer “phases”, from an internal OpenAI document: Phase 1 West Des Moines, 10,000 V100s, GPT-3; Phase 2 Iowa, 18,000→~25,000 A100s, GPT-4; Phase 3 Arizona, hundreds of thousands of H100s; Phase 4 Wisconsin, ~$10bn, B100s; Phase 5 ~$100bn; ch. 5 on the post-ChatGPT funding of Chinese models; the book takes only the environmental filing’s 169 liters a second for the Cerrillos site, not Hao’s population comparison, which she later retracted; the quotation “In AI, whoever has the biggest computer gets the most benefits” is read in the full text of the book, not on the publisher’s page the URL names; in the Epilogue, Uruguay is told as the campaigner Daniel Pena’s account in Hao’s words: the environmental ministry “quietly approved the project, revealing the decision only after the thirty-day public contestation window was over, he says”; ch. 5, on Chinese funding after ChatGPT: companies and investors began funding the development of gargantuan models “with gusto”, having “seen enough evidence that they could recoup their investments through commercial applications”; ch. 5, on Microsoft’s investment: “$1 billion investment came with $1 billion expectations; OpenAI was on the clock to deliver something that would justify the expense”; ch. 12, an OpenAI employee on Phase 5: “we’re running out of land and power”; ch. 5, Hao’s own sentence, reporting without quotation marks a Chinese AI researcher’s analysis of China before ChatGPT: no team “would get $1 billion, let alone ten times more, to develop a massively expensive technology without an articulated vision of exactly what it would look like and what it would be good for”; ch. 5, her conclusion: “Everything OpenAI did” … “was the opposite of inevitable” (everything lower-case mid-sentence in the source); ch. 6, “Ascension”, on a memo Altman sent to the company in late 2019, quoted from her copy of it, her note reading “Copy of the memo.”: OpenAI needed to “be number one” by the end of 2020 in four categories, which she lists as technical results, compute, money to acquire more compute, and preparation, and “We still need many more 10x leaps to get to AGI”; the Prologue, “A Run for the Throne”: the empires “seize and extract precious resources to feed their vision of artificial intelligence: the work of artists and writers; the data of countless individuals posting about their experiences and observations online; the land, energy, and water required to house and run massive data centers and supercomputers” and “exploit the labor of people globally to clean, tabulate, and prepare that data”; ch. 12, “Plundered Earth”, on Cerrillos: “In late 2019, as communities across the country began to hold referendums in response to the movement to reform local and national politics, MOSACAT piggybacked on the referendum in Cerrillos to add a question about whether residents agreed for Google to build a facility that would consume so much of the community’s water”; “In December 2019, MOSACAT won; the referendum to build the data center was rejected with a slim majority of the vote.”; ch. 7, “Science in Captivity”, on China after GPT-3, in a sentence whose note cites Ding and Xiao: “In China, GPT-3 similarly piqued intensified interest in large-scale models”, the Chinese giants treating the direction “as a novel addition to their research repertoire, not a new singular path of AI development warranting the suspension of their other projects”; the sentence is Brockman’s, in Hao’s own words, “Brockman told me in 2019,” in the chapter on scale; Brockman’s title at the time of her reporting, from her MIT Technology Review profile of OpenAI of 17 February 2020, “The messy, secretive reality behind OpenAI’s bid to save the world”, whose caption reads “Greg Brockman, co-founder and CTO”; the same profile’s caption gives “Dario Amodei, research director” and its text “the policy team, especially Jack Clark, the director”, their titles at the time of her 2019 reporting; ch. 12, the Phase 1 code names: “Microsoft code-named the Phase 1 supercomputer Odyssey; OpenAI called it Owl”; ch. 5, on the machine: “Microsoft was about to deliver a new supercomputer to OpenAI as part of its investment, with ten thousand Nvidia V100s”; ch. 5 notes: “Author interview with Dario Amodei, August 2019” and “Author interview with Jack Clark, August 2019”; Notes, “Author interview with Brockman, August 2019”; ch. 5, the run: “Amodei wanted to use all of those chips, all at once”, “Before then, models were already considered large-scale if trained on a few dozen chips”; ch. 5: “Where Amodei saw a larger language model as a necessary prerequisite for AI safety research, Altman saw its potential for fulfilling OpenAI’s promise to Microsoft”; ch. 6, Kaplan: “a close friend from grad school and former roommate who worked part time at OpenAI and had led the discovery of scaling laws”; ch. 12, Phase 5: Altman was “casually floating the idea of the $100 billion supercomputer for Phase 5. After the blowout success of ChatGPT, Altman tempered his expectations”; ch. 5: “Not even in Silicon Valley did other companies and investors move until after ChatGPT to funnel unqualified sums into scaling. That included Google and DeepMind”; ch. 5, the date of the Chinese researcher’s analysis: “As ChatGPT swept the world by storm in early 2023”) In the Sources
- CoreWeave, Inc., “CoreWeave Announces Pricing of $1.25 Billion of Senior Notes and €2 Billion of Senior Notes,” press release, 11 June 2026 (a private offering of “$1.25 billion aggregate principal amount of 9.625% senior notes due 2032 and €2 billion aggregate principal amount of 8.500% senior notes due 2032”, maturing on 15 July 2032, issued at par and guaranteed on a senior unsecured basis by certain wholly-owned subsidiaries, the closing expected on 18 June 2026; the release read whole in a capture of 29 August 2026). In the Sources
- CoreWeave, Inc., “CoreWeave Prices Upsized $3.7 Billion Convertible Senior Notes Offering,” press release, 18 September 2026 (a private offering of “$3.7 billion aggregate principal amount of its 2.875% convertible senior notes due 2033”, “upsized from the previously announced offering of $3.0 billion”, to settle on 22 September 2026; guaranteed by the subsidiaries that guarantee its existing notes, among them its “1.75% convertible senior notes due 2031 and 1.75% convertible senior notes due 2032”; the release read whole in a capture of 30 September 2026). In the Sources
- Hut 8 Corp., “Hut 8 Announces Pricing of $3.25 Billion of Investment-Grade Senior Secured Notes for River Bend Data Center Project,” 27 April 2026, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, EDGAR accession 0001104659-26-049810 (Hut 8 DC LLC “has priced a $3.25 billion private offering” of “6.192% senior secured notes due 2042”; to “finance the development and construction of a turnkey data center with 245 megawatts of critical IT capacity and the related substation” at River Bend; “The Notes will be fully amortizing with amortization payments payable semi-annually beginning on May 15, 2028”; “The Notes are non-recourse to Hut 8”; the release names no rating and no tenant; read from EDGAR on 12 October 2026). In the Sources
- Hut 8 Corp., “Hut 8 Announces Pricing of $4.25 Billion of Investment-Grade Senior Secured Notes for Beacon Point Data Center Project,” 4 June 2026, Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K, EDGAR accession 0001104659-26-070744 (Beacon Point DC LLC “has priced a $4.25 billion private offering” of “6.129% senior secured notes due 2042”; “six data halls with a combined total of 352 megawatts of critical IT capacity” on “an approximately 521-acre property in Nueces County, Texas”; the facility “will be leased to a tenant that is a high-investment-grade company”, “rated AA- or higher”; the release’s subhead, “Fully amortizing project financing due 2042”, and “The Notes are non-recourse to Hut 8.”; read from EDGAR on 11 October 2026). In the Sources
And 34 more: search the Sources.
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Notes.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/notes (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-notes-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Notes}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/notes},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}