TRASHFUTURE - *UNLOCKED* Scaffold to Heaven

Episode Date: March 17, 2026

Riley has been driven insane by a… company hinging on a single Australian man that appears to be bamboozling the British State with complex financial chicanery, and now you all have to hear the story of how NScale started out as a landlord for bitcoin miners and became the government’s best hope for a “Sovereign AI” but that has only a scaffolding yard to its name. Except it also doesn’t own the scaffolding yard either. If you want to hear more bonus episodes like this one, consider signing up on our Patreon! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hi, everyone. It's Riley, who you're not really usually used to hearing as the bumper person. But today, you can see perhaps that we have unlocked a bonus episode to the free feed. We've done that just because we think this one might be a little bit newsy, so we just wanted to unlock it so more people could hear it. So please enjoy how a data center that wasn't kind of drove me a bit insane. See you soon. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this. It's Thursday bonus episode of TF. It is Riley. It's Hussein. It's Nova. And I, listen, I started Googling. And I might have Googled one too many times. Yeah, you might have accidentally done some journalism and you might have fucked around and we might be about to break actual legitimate news. news on this.

Like little, like tiny, like tiny news, like little news. I don't know. Something that's very us, and it's all, you know, down to actually doing some research. So, Riley, thank you. You know, while you've been doing that, I have been with my friends in the sort of woke, deep state trying to remove Winston Churchill from various banknotes and sort of like statues and so on in order to replace him with the animals from the wind and the willows. Yeah, I've also been running a counter campaign,

but my aim is to replace the Winston Churchill 5 pound note with a pristine image of Evangelian Unit 1. That's a throwback for people who remember the time where I got quoted... No, I had a whole article made of me in The Daily Star because I had set up a joke campaign to replace the Winston Churchill statue with a statue of either Unit 1. And when I was asked why this would be a better option,

I said in my infinite wisdom that either unit one has a more aspirational body type. And they printed that, and they printed that like verbatim. And I had like people sort of getting mad at me, including this one guy who emailed saying, I watched Evangelion on YouTube and I didn't get it and I'm mad at you because of that. You accidentally, you said that Winston Churchill had been frame-mogged and people wanted to kill you. Yeah, exactly. That's right. Yeah, that's correct. I was there before. for clavicular, and I want people to know that. What do you think the armor Winston Churchill is wearing for protection?

It's restraints that bend him to our will. Yo, of course. I like, like, my, so for those of you who don't know, like, four years ago, the Bank of England ran like a public consultation that said, hey, what do you want on the money? And an overwhelming majority of respondents said, I don't know, animals. They were like, okay, I guess we'll do some like wildlife or whatever. Yeah, we'll put animals on the money, sure.

which by the way Canada does we always have animals on the money yeah because it's a normal thing for a country to do is to be like we've got to put something on the money how about some of the stuff that's here as opposed to a guy who died 800 years ago or whatever yeah but then but then in Canada

you have like currency but you know you have a coin referred to as the loony this is true I'm not I'm not going to say that Canada is a hugely serious country but still we need a British loony we need a British loony how about the freaking Prime Minister Can he say that?

There we go. I didn't know you got a gig at S&LUK. Can I just stop you there? You can't say what you have in Canada. You have to say we. You are Canadian too. That is true. That is true. I do have that passport somewhere.

They're calling it the United Kingdom's most crypto-Canadian podcast. Yeah, but like Nigel Farage said about this is the Bank of England is replacing Winston Churchill with a picture of a beaver on our banknotes. this is the definition of woke. And just, I would love to create a compendium of all of the stuff Nigel Farage is called woke. We all know that what it really is

stuff that he considers to be unusual or inappropriate. But the fact that he uses the word definition for such a nebulous concept is very amusing. It shouldn't be a beaver, but it should be a British minor influencer, Bivo.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with Bivo, but... It's not the definition of woke. The definition of woke would be replacing Winston. Churchill with a picture of a non-binary barista with pronouns and a septum piercing, which we should do. Yeah, we should actually do that. Oh, check out this. Check this out. I'm about to be woker than you could even have ever believed. The definition of woke would be replacing the number on the

money with a zero and making all the money worth nothing and having a gift economy. This is the shit that they teach you at AdBusters. I learned so much at Camp AdBusters. I I swear to, I don't know if this is like a false memory. I do think that they did issue a camp-wide currency of notes marked zero to encourage a gift economy. Oh, every store you's hell from that place is a beautiful little gem. It was so cool. It's like, I still, my favorite one is when the guy was like, all right, everybody, take off your shoes. We're going to learn to drive barefoot to save gas.

Looking back, I don't know if actually. that saves gas, but everyone did get barefoot. Incredible. After that, bafflingly, we do have a couple news items to talk about, and then I've driven myself mad about N-scale. So I'm going to start a Nova to take us away for the first item, which I have as November Navy rat fuck. Yeah, I was also going to highlight that you titled at that.

So a little bit of sort of Labor Rights politics happening again. So you may remember that by choosing to not allow the U.S. to do strikes on around from British air bases, Stama made an enemy for life of Donald Trump. Well, he's now trying desperately to weasel out of this. We should put that on the money. We should put that on the money to commemorate the labor right, the weasel. The turning weasel, the reverse ferret. No, so they've leaked some cabinet meeting minutes, which would seem to suggest that,

But Stama, poor, poor Kirstama, wanted very much to give Donald Trump what he wanted, but he was bullied and overruled by his own ministers, you know, who were too woke for it. Did you say that this has happened just like with Peter Mandelson? Yeah, I would. Boy. And I think, you know, he was held hostage by the wokeson cabinet. And so that's just in this sort of normal cost of doing business, but also shoved in front of the bus is the chief of defense. And this is sort of a bit more unusual. This doesn't happen quite as often. But Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton has had leaked to the spectator the fact that he said something kind of flippant at this cabinet meeting, which is going to maybe end his career. Because Trump is mad that we did not send one of our carriers. And this guy, Knighton, said, we don't need an aircraft carrier. It's called Cyprus, right?

which is a pretty good bit. It would have aged better had Hezbollah not managed to like smash a drone into Cyprus, but still. But they're punishing the guy for doing bits. And this is something that is just strikes me as kind of instinctive flailing on the sort of Labor Rights part. You know, the kind of urge to knife everyone in the back that's taking some kind of weird directions here. It's also, I think there's a navy angle here as well because obviously this is a, uh, an RAF officer and the last guy was a Navy officer and the Navy are feeling a bit shut out and jealous. And they're being like, this plane's dipshit disrespected our boat. And so now there are sort of sources close to Starmner saying that Knighton has lost the confidence of number 10. And he may well just get forced out of this, merely for being a bit sarcastic on the team's call. And you never want to hand it to a guy.

But I think that much I will give him solidarity on. Yeah, I mean, look, this is number one, this is the second issue in like the same week of Stramer being like, I'm just surrounded by these terrible advisors who keep lying to me and misdirecting me. It's like, you know, good czar who's being bullied by his boy ours. Well, also, it's like if you put yourself in this guy's place, it's you have to answer a kind of stupid question from one of Starmes' apparatchiks. without ever getting sarcastic. And that's an impossible task for anyone, I would suggest. It's also kind of easier to fuck over the troops in this way because they have to kind of stand by the military advice they were given.

And this is why this is a hatchet job is because it would be, I think, vanishingly unlikely for the actual military advice to have been, send, you know, this sort of carrier and this guy to have gone, no, I don't want to do that because I'm woke and gay and soy, right? But you can't say that, right? Because none of that's disclosable. And so this is a real, like, sort of, you know, palace backstabbing that is, it just bespeaks to me a sort of like last days of the furor bunker kind of mentality on Starmer's pal. Oh, I mean, and the other thing, right, behind all of this is that this is like palace backstabbing to show support for a thing that,

that Nigel Farage even has already realized is something he has to backpedal his show of support for. If you want a real sense of the chain of command here, it's like the Chief of Defense stuff, the Prime Minister, Donald Trump, right? And because Stama has now been embarrassed in front of Trump, this guy is going to have to go.

Also, like, one of the points to recognize is that, like, Stama sort of set himself out as being like a serious statesman, right? And, like, this is the consequence of it. Like, you know, to sort of paraphrase very badly, like one of my favorite tweets. It's like, what did you think statesmanship was like, you know, papers, essays, vibes?

Like, this is it. Like, this is just statesmanship where, you know, unfortunately the person that you have to follow, like has no sort of sense of, you know, has no desire to sort of even perform the type of being a statesman. And it's just like openly stupid and you have to sort of go along with it. And, you know, this is the result, which is that like, you know, and it's also the case of like, well, you either have to sort of be all in or you're not.

But it is like quite interesting to me how, this is like the one issue where Starmer's like inability to do anything actually probably like sways well with the public with public mood right like no one really wants to go to war. Yeah. Even like Farage when he was sort of pretending that like oh we should be helping the Americans and stuff

wasn't really convinced by it. So I don't understand why there's this pressure to sort of be like I mean unless I mean I the only thing I can sort of bring it down to is this sense of wanting to at least pretend that the sort of so-called special relationships still exists. Very west wing brain, that's the only thing I can sort of think of as to like why he's sort of act, like, why Stamer is acting like he's already gone to war and lost despite the fact that he hasn't. Well, I think the answer is actually he has, right? He's gone to war against circumstances and he was armed with basically hope that the global

economy would deliver the circumstances for Blairism again, and then it didn't, and now he's lost. and, you know, he also, the part of what has to deliver for Blairism is there needs to be a Clinton in the White House, or Blairism also doesn't work, you know? Yeah, because otherwise you find yourself sort of fielding the American president being like, hey, going to bomb the Middle East, you better fucking get in on this with me. Going to bond the Middle East. Also, you have terrible shoes. I'm going to order you a pair of size 13 floor shines. Oh, my God, I've been thinking about the shoes thing all week. Jesus Christ. I mean, to be honest, like, at least they get shoes. If you're the head of... Starm was walking around barefoot. I mean, he's driving in a much more ecologically conscious way.

He's turned his normal car into something like a Prius by driving barefoot alone. But when I see this, when I see like blaming and backstabbing to try to show your support... What I find is so weird is that so many things in the UK are done for a domestic audience. Right? Like there is a huge amount of like the relationship with the EU, for example, puzzled. the EU because all of it was grandstanding for Tory voters in Britain. It's why the Westminster bubble really even is about what these people think that they want to appear like domestically. And everything is refracted through that lens. And it's strange to see it almost reversed where

like what Starmer is doing is everything is for the performance. It's everything is for an international audience of like one guy and his friend and his like cronies who were all waddling around in shoes that are three sizes too big. Yeah. It's very odd. But to me, it's something that is flailing. And as you say, Nova, like, floundering and the final days of the Fura Bunker, that maybe firing this chief of defense staff will turn things around.

I just looked this up, by the way. He's been imposed for 186 days. So a real, like, Tony Radican ensuring his successor gets a sort of Liz trust tenure, Bruce little stuff. Oh, God. I mean, a masterclass in running a state. Next thing before we get to N-scale, I wanted to note, and Amazon is having some issues that are kind of relevant, actually, to the N-scale thing we're talking about. Weirdly, PC gamer has the best headline on this. Quote, Amazon owns up to needing more human oversight over AI code. Unfortunately, it wants to do that with fewer people. So, if you want to sum up the concept of technology replacing labor,

but also intensifying exploitation in one headline, there it is. It's right there. Yeah. It's crazy how all of these companies are like tearing themselves apart, not just companies, public services. Baffling. But basically, what happened is Amazon's digital infrastructure has been increasingly fucked, but also they laid off like 10% of their corporate workforce. They're going to lay off more. And they've set an internal target for developers to use AI tools once a week at 80%. So they want 80% of their developers using AI. AI tools once a week, which is being tracked. Like, it's a key performance indicator they are monitoring.

Just like, no, you have to, we've got the key logger on. You have to talk to Claude. No, serious, this has become extremely common because this is downstream of the fact that, like, 80% of executives think that AI makes their job easier. 5% of people who actually do something in like a knowledge work field think the same. And so the executives need to force people to use these terrible tools. Yeah, and this makes sense whether like we keep feeding stuff into the efficiency machine. And for some reason, we're not seeing efficiency from this.

We're going to have to use more people to make sure the efficiency machine works so that we can lay off people faster. We have 90 guys whose full-time job is to watch the efficiency machine. We can't wait until this starts working. I sometimes think the kind of clawed vending machine story was a bit kind of patent, you know, designed to make it seem cute and everything. But the kind of contradictions of that vending machine being. played out across Amazon is really funny. I mean, I know some people who work in, like, various companies, and they tell me, yeah,

they're being tracked. But what they do is they log in to their AI tool at once a week, right? And they type, hey, give me a recipe for cupcakes or whatever. And they go back to doing their job as normal. And then the company they're working for gets to say, we've increased AI usage among, like, key people by 30%. Like, it's a real thing that's actually happening as they're trying to clod

store the entire economy. So, anyway, if you remember as well, their internal tool called Kiro caused its first major outage in 2025. We talked about it at the time. It deleted a whole live environment because it was trying to debug it. So, this is from PC Gamer. No bug.

Hey, you always say, the safest computer is one that you don't build. Dave Treadwell, different PC gamer. Senior vice president of Amazon's e-commerce services team is reported to have said to to employees over email, quote, folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently. You are Amazon. You are the internet. AWS is just most of it now. Oh, I kind of, I forgot for a second that they were that. Yeah. It's not just a store. It's quite a bit more. Or it's barely even a store anymore. Yeah. It's a sort of, it's sort of like an internet,

like, it's web services carrying the carcass of an online retailer behind it. It's a TEMU reseller, was one of many TEMU resellers plus web services at a movie studio, that I remember what the movie studio was once called before he got married, a lost leader for Jeff's sex life. So, anyway, the briefing note from this week's meeting reveals now that junior and mid-level engineers at Amazon will require senior sign-off for any AI-assisted changes. So the efficiency machine has created several new bureaucratic steps because it's so unreliable. It keeps breaking everything. Fantastic.

Awesome. I love the future. Through how gritted teeth do you have to make that consideration where you're like this thing that we're reconfiguring everything towards we're making everyone use? Yeah, we don't necessarily trust it to touch anything. Because it will fuck us again. and if we go back on it it's like oh we we we fucked up it's called Amazon now and we can't change it back because

Kiro changed the name on everything we now have to pretend that that was on purpose or else everyone's going to think we're not going to be among like the cool hyperscalers we're going to have to everyone's going to know that we fucked up but this happening everywhere it's just mostly reported on at Amazon

the FT said this Amazon laid off more than 30,000 employees since October 2025 one longstanding employee paints a particularly damning picture saying, quote, day to day it just feels untenable. Our workload is increasing and the number of problems to deal with are just piling up.

Some managers know that this is the case, but executives just keep pointing to some bigger AI picture that's as yet undefined. No, no, no, it's fine. Kiro is going to iterate and eventually it's going to learn that it doesn't have to delete the whole live environment every

time it wants to try and fix it. And if it does, maybe it has a plan we don't understand. basically, Kiro moves in mysterious ways. Doing some Kero mysticism. I'm becoming a Kiro Sufi. I mean, this is, this is functionally what it is mysticism, right? And I think it would be more honest if you sort of like go into these executives' offices and instead of the kind of strange inner light compelling them to be like, no, we got to feed more shit to AI,

they just had the schedules out, you know? They just had some like tomes, some like big braziers for candles. I do think that there is a little bit, I think the mysticism thing actually has, carries quite a lot of conceptual weight. I actually think you could point to the release of Chet GPT in 2022 as a kind, if you imagine that like the religion of the sort of global north is the worship of Mammin and Capital, you could imagine, I think the nailing that the 2020 release of Chad GPT is a kind of 95 Theses moment. moment where you remember the AI priesthood thing we we write the Henry Kissinger like yeah yeah well they should have been more literal they should have demanded like robes well you know because what these executives if you think these executives like sea level executives or sort of heads of department or whatever are sort of various levels of priest of the cult of capital and Mammon what the AI revolution promises is

by pure faith in this thing shall you be saved your acts don't matter that Protestants. It's Protestant. I'm not thrilled with that. Do we have... The cult of Mammon has created Protestants in the form of AI true believers, I'm afraid. Welcome Protestantism too. Yeah, we've invented neo-Protestantism. Oh, God, damn. Because normal Protestantism was not sufficiently obsessed with, like, wealth. Capitalism now has Protestantism. And it has the kind of shrews. thing of like self exculpation, you know, God knows my heart, so he forgives me for that DUI type thing. Yep. I'm afraid it's all Protestantism. And we're about, I guess, what we're

going to talk to next, talked about next, end scale is, well, let's see where it fits in in the sort of whole Protestant Reformation sort of story, because I'm pretty sure we can, we can find like a prince bishopric that it, that it maps to. Oh, yeah. I mean, this is, I, I mean, this is, I, I'm looking here at the nose. We've got like eight pages of this. What you've written is functionally like a short seller report for us. I had a lot of fun doing this. So the following is from a 15th of January press release by the government.

One that I think we actually talked about when it was released last year. Yeah, but in a kind of like, you know, news you turn down leaving the house in the start of the disaster movie kind of way. Quite, yes. Oh, the government's investing a lot of money in this thing called N-scale. Well, time to go to my job at the, you know, stock. market. So, here's the press release. One of our leading homegrown success stories end scale. So, bury that in your mind, right? Take that front of mind. Our leading homegrown success story end scale. Committed to delivering a two and a half billion dollar investment to support the

UK's data infrastructure over the next three years, deepening their commitment even further. I have also, this is one of my favorite lines, put pen to paper on a contract. Yeah, I have the concept of a plan. To build the largest UK sovereign AI data center in Loudoun Essex by 2026. It's another key concept, sovereign AI. The site is expected to be up and running by late 2026, unlocking more than 750 jobs during its construction and a further 250 permanent role. Makes sense for any state to be like, if you believe that this AI shit works, you want BRITGPT because, you know, that way regular chat GPT isn't transphobic enough. Yeah, true. Regular chat GPT doesn't have the bangs. Well, chat will

Chat GPT normally is like, it's kind of supportive and it's like encouraging, but Brit GPT is patronising, but it reminds you that like, you're still a piece of shit. The maximally discouraging AI. Like you put in British GPT that you just want like a simple like pasta tomato recipe. And it's like not only sort of calling you slurs and also like demanding that in order to get the recipe, you have to post a picture of your genitals. Yeah. It also says at the bottom.

I hope that you, you bought the Tesco own brand, 55P spaghetti. But so we've, we've seen the. of fallout of AI on mental health, right? But it's always been the kind of very florid kind, you know, that's very enables kind of delusions, you know, really sort of like heats people up. This is going to be the first one that feels like dunking your head in a bucket of cold piss, where it's just going to, like, the mental health effects of Brit GPT would be like absolute unipolar depression.

The first AI that doesn't give you psychosis, but depression. Yeah, there's no up. It's all down. Don't like it bears the door. Yeah. This is the press release. So keep that in mind. I now want to read from a recent investigative piece in The Guardian, which is good and tells one part of what I think is a much larger story.

The government announced the project in 2025, part of a plan to turbocharge the economy. Reports say it will be three times as powerful as the fastest computer in the United States, the global top tier for AI infrastructure. Yeah, it can call you a slur like infinitely faster than some kind of like American chud, like grok or whatever. Oh yeah. Yeah, it is able to, it reaches backwards and forwards in time. It can non-consensually undress you before it's even like known who you are. So the press that releases announcing a gleaming supercomputer on the outskirts of North London depict a glass and concrete building rising from a tree-line street. By the end of this year, the artist's impression is supposed to be a reality.

Feels kind of weird to build our sovereign AI in Essex, but then again, maybe that's the kind of most spiritually truthful place for us. Yeah, we've, we know what it is. We've, there was one British person whose personality was used as the template for Essex GPT and it's Tom Skinner. Bosch. Bosch GPT. Oh, it's Bosch GPT. It doesn't give you depression. It tries to cure your depression by going for a walk, but that it doesn't have legs. I hate when my sovereign AI moves to Dubai. Oh, of course, of course the Brit sovereign AI would move to Dubai. Well, it's on its way back now. Anyway, but when the Guardian visited last month, there was no sign of it. Instead, the for Plot in Lauten was a depot

stacked with pylons and scrap metal under a corrugated roof while flatbed lorries drove in and out stacked with poles. Nine months before the project is due to be completed, it is still a working scaffolding yard. Maybe it's doing some of the scaffolding. That would be authentic, you know? I love the idea

of talking to Bosch GPT and it's like, whatever you ask, and it's like, listen, whatever you want to talk about, you made 12,570 pounds last year, right? And you don't have to report any more than that. To all cash and Brit GPD is the world's first large language model whose hardware comes with a little slot to put in bills. That's how you buy tokens. It only buys tokens in cash.

But land records appear to indicate that Nscale had not yet been registered as the owner of the site over a year after it claimed to have purchased it. Nscale could not say whether the company owned the land and could not give a date the one which the purchase had occurred. Well, they had put pen to paper on the contract. And once you put pen to paper, your goose is basically cooked. Like, you're done, right? And, like, and sometimes people get ADHD or whatever, you know, like, don't ask me about the art for Shadow Doge, you know? Like, I've, sometimes tasks just get past you. And maybe sometimes you take a lot of government investment, like, you know, $2.5 billion or whatever, and you forget to do anything with it.

Well, talk about, like, the investment in what they received. It's a bit more unusual than that. But they did receive a lot of endorsement. They received direct endorsement by the government in January of last year as these homegrown hero, this most exciting AI company in Britain. And at that point, they'd not purchased the scaffolding yard that they said they were going to build the supercomputer on. And also, they didn't make... Before it. What a sentence. I mean, I guess it has to be somewhere.

It's weird that it's a scaffolding yard. It's weird that it would be anything. But also, they only filed for planning permission to build the thing the day the Guardian sent them email saying it was investigating. them. Oh, God. Oh, fuck. Okay. Yeah, no, that's really funny. It's very much the energy of, um, of someone being like, oh, do you have, have you prepared for that meeting? You're like, yeah, yeah, I did everything yesterday. I was going to make a couple edits, send it over to you. Sending the tutor that deliberately corrupt attachments and being like, I don't know what happened.

I guess I'll just have to send you it again, like, you know, a couple of days after. And meanwhile, you were furiously timed. Or the, the great horror for you. anyone in a white kind of like a professional job. I guess soon to be automated, whatever, is when you say, oh yeah, I've been working on that. I'll finish it up and send it over to you. We're like, fuck, I have to start it. You open the document you're supposed to work on.

You've requested access to this document. Yeah, no, it's very similar. This is what had. They were like, oh, fuck. We forgot. Holy shit. Your job was to build the supercomputer. I thought I was doing government relations. So I was doing government relations. We didn't. Sometimes you forget to assign a build the

super-comfuser guy. In fact, sometimes you forget to assign a buy the scaffolding yard guy. Yeah. I don't know what they were doing. So, anyway, N-scale was only incorporated on the 29th of May 2024 with initial share capital of $2, 100% owned by Arcon Energy of Australia, a company that used to buy data assets and lease them to cryptocurrency miners. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. So they only filed accounts in early March again after the Guardian started sending them email. We didn't think you were check limited. Honestly, it was like,

oh, come on. Why don't you go stop some real crime, LLC? This has been so funny talking to like Ed Zittran particularly, where we've talked about how much of the sort of AI bubble as just sort of this facade. They didn't really bother with the facade. And it's like after the sheriff comes by, they start building the facade of the town, you know?

Yeah, like, this is, going to be a theme that runs through this whole thing. So, anyway, it's weird, though, that, like, every time a big data center announcement is built, because by the way, N-scale is also involved in Stargate, UK, the other most extant thing in the entire world. And I don't mean to say, like, this happens every time someone tries to build a data center, but it seems like a lot of these high-profile record-braiding data center construction announcements, like when Meadow was like, oh, yeah, we're going to build a data center the size of New York City or, you know, Stargate or whatever, two just jumped to top of mind. It just never, it's always hype. It never really

materializes. It's true for Stargate in Texas as well, by the way. So, this is weirdly inept for a company that, like, professionally buys data centers, leases other data centers, has a joint venture with a modular data center company that fell through. They claim to be building 1.3 gigawatts of capacity around the world, but they, in fact, have never built a data center before, ever. This company has never built a data center, not one, not ever, anywhere in world. Never. Oh, okay. They have bought them, they have leased them, they have added to them, but they've never built

a data center. Guy who does not really grasp the concept of the thing not already existing when he says he's going to build things? It's like, hey, hey, I'm supposed to build a supercomputer, right? But the place that I bought is a scaffolding yard. Who do I call? Hey, you, get all this scaffolding out of the AI data center. Can you guys, can you turn this scaffolding?

Can you build God with this? Could you scaffold God, please? Like, we're kind of on the clock, so like, you know, anytime. Yeah, we forgot to do what the Guardian's asking around. Do you mind? We promised the government that we would use this scaffolding to build God. So, uh, top to it, I guess. Anyway, but let's also look at this claim.

This is back to the Guardian, by the way. I'll tell you when I get beyond them. The government's announcement said, N-scale had, quote, signed a contract to build a supercomputer by 2026, And it was investing. So Nscale was going to invest two and a half billion in the UK's economy. Nscale said it had already bought the site in Loughton. So it said it had bought the site.

It was lying. I'd promise 750 jobs would be created by the building of the supercomputer. Yeah, weirdly old scaffold. Yeah. Look, we knew we'd take some. It would be some scaffolding involved. We didn't think it would be this much. But this is sort of important.

And you wonder why the government didn't catch. So back to the Guardian. The contract the government was referring to appears to be a contract between Microsoft and N-scale. according to an N-scale spokesman. The government said it had no mechanism to audit the $2.5 billion investment, quote, which may well include equipment and capital funding, but was not a former contract, rather a memorandum of intent.

So what you have here is a kind of piece of tracing paper on which has been drawn in crayon, the old Windows logo. Maybe that's the new money. I'm going to take this and I'm going to announce this as a like solid, gold, two and a half billion dollar contract. You drew the Windows logo on it. You drew a stick figure of the king on the back. And then you wrote two and a half billion in the pound signed. And you're like, this is money now. I have a question, right? Because initially I thought this was two and a half billion pounds of the

government's money, right? It was two and a half billion dollars of Microsoft's money. I can sort of understand the government not catching this. That's just like getting kind of tricked. Fine, it happens. What does Microsoft think about this? Well, Microsoft, so basically Microsoft said we, all we did was we said we would spend $2.5 billion with you if you ever built the thing. Like we commit to buy $2.5 billion worth of compute from you. So essentially they went to Microsoft and they were like, if we can take this scaffolding place, buy it, which we still haven't done, and then build the supercomputer on it, then you'll give us. $2.5 billion worth of investment. And Microsoft said, yeah, okay, sure.

They took the printout of the email saying, yeah, okay, sure, to the government. And the government went, holy shit, Microsoft's going to invest two and a half billion pounds or like dollars in like our sovereign, our blessed economy. November. I hate to say, yes, that's exactly what happened. But yes, that's exactly what happened. Jesus Christ. A celebrity likes one of your posts and you think, and you think that they're your best friend now.

And no one can tell you otherwise. Yeah. It's like, oh yeah, I'm boys with Rob Delaney. I met him once, basically. Yeah. That's so embarrassing to be that desperate for any good news or any investment that you get fooled by the sort of like tunnel painted onto the wall. Rob Delaney actually did say that if I could build an AI supercomputer, he would invest two billion pounds of his own money into it. And so.

Oh, that's so, we should get going. I know a scaffolding yard that doesn't currently have a supercomputer on it. Maybe we can start there. But this raises a lot of questions. I'm going to walk through answering. Namely, how did this happen? And more importantly, why did the government let it happen and who benefits? I can answer most of them and make some educated guesses for the rest.

So we're going to kind of move beyond the Guardian article a bit here, which is mainly about, hey, this company doesn't seem to exist. And the government seems to have misrepresented how much it does exist and then never audit never looked into it. The land, they could have checked the land registry. Like, it was public information that N-scale did not own this land. But no one checked because no one wanted to, like, why ruin a good headline? So, this is the corporate history of N-scale.

N-scale starts life as the brainchild of two Australians, former miners. Not like, we're all former miners, but former people who mine. Josh Payne and Nathan Townsend. Payne is our main man here because Townsend left a couple years ago. Hilariously, this article was published in Incorporated, magazine on March 9th of this year. So like two days before it was really revealed to be kind of nothing. This former coal miner messaged a CEO on LinkedIn. Now his AI startup is worth $14.6 billion. He got a LinkedIn success article written about him in Incorporated magazine.

Wait, wait, wait, so you're telling me that these guys, they came out of a mine, saw daylight for the first time anyhow long, realized, sort of apprehended instantly the world around them is based on scams. Those scams are focused on pretending that you can build God. And then went, oh, these are all like fucking business success idiots. If I just message them on LinkedIn being like, hey, can you endorse me for building God with scaffolding? One of them will do it. And they did? You've missed a couple steps, but again, more or less right. Yeah. You've missed a couple steps that you have no way of knowing about yet. But yes, that is basically correct again. I feel like I'm doing well in the tutorial group.

Basically, before launching, this is from Incorporated magazine, before launching N-scale in 2024 and moving from Australia, again, none of these people are like, hey, how come this thing launched in 2024 is like the UK's sovereign data provider? That's weird. It's like really funny to be like, oh, I've been doing real work by accident and I've accidentally figured out that like instead, all of the money is in fake work, you know, I've just been queuing coal out of the thing to kill the planet with, but instead we can kill the planet way more efficiently by doing less.

So this next sentence is going to, I think one for Hussein, designed in a lab for Hussein. Ready to go. He worked in coal mines where long shifts left stretches of downtime. He filled by reading entrepreneurship books such as the four-hour work week and listening to podcasts. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah, great. Ah!

This is, okay. Everything evil comes from Australia. You know how all of the charts, like, claim that now they're Nazis because of the, like, Gen Z, Bosnia, Mini, Australian women in the office thing. Well, reverse of this, right, I am going to institute the red terror because of the existence of the Australian coal miner's CEO Secrets Diary podcast, mother fuck, who has moved from like one method of destroying the environment to the other. He actually had an interim method of destroying the environment before he settled on this one. Of course he did.

So, Eve, the first business he started was a recruitment platform that connected construction workers with jobs across Australia, which is how we got wealthy enough to then, because this happened during the cryptocurrency boom, to buy distressed data centers that were near sources of renewable energy and then lease them to Bitcoin mining companies. So he was a landl- He was taking up renewable energy capacity from the grid to lease data centers. He was a landlord for Bitcoin, basically. This is the worst co-worker energy I've ever seen on a human being. And he never built a data center. They only bought distressed beta centers, including in Norway, which is their only current operational data center. By the way, that's what he did is he sent a... Imagine if a Norwegian guy was Australian? He sent the LinkedIn message to one of the wealthiest guys in Norway, the CEO of Accur Energy.

They're like, hey, why can I take this data center over? We can use it for God stuff. This is why you should always check your message requests, because sometimes it might be an Australian man asking you to endorse him for the concept of Lutophisk. So basically, there's the Australian Energy Company that is really the landlord to Bitcoin miners that's now data centers in Australia, or was. Then there's the Norwegian company, which is also in partnership to build Stargate Norway with Aker Energy. Yeah, this is absolutely a case of sequentially chasing the bag, right? And as the sort of capital hunted around for some bullshit that it could make the new frontier, it has been sequential banks. First it was crypto.

And, well, first it was your sort of like, you know, regular dot com shit. Then it was crypto. Now it's AI. And this guy has been chasing after all of them. And it's paid off for him every time. How could you not be a scammer in this market? We are idiots for like having any basic sense of morality. We could have been coining money.

All we needed was, like, we just needed to have a data center. We did this thing, right, of, like, chasing whatever the current thing is, and rebranding our company as a way of following it cynically, as a joke to open the podcast with, right? Remember the week we became a SPAC? Oil warehouse. If we had done that for real, we would be trillionaires right now. And the government would be meeting with us going,

Trash Future Spack and Oil Warehouse seem like they've got their shit figured out. We're going to loudly trumpet their credentials to everyone. Honestly, oil warehouse would probably float right now. I think they would come see. I mean, we could be like, we would be walking in head-to-to-toe Viberg boots. Nothing but Viberg boots.

Oh, my God. A gown made of Viberg boots. You've been looking at Vyberg boots, haven't you? I haven't. I haven't. So the British version. version of N-scale, which is N-scale global holdings, is only incorporated on the 29th of May 2024. So this homegrown AI champion is an Australian-N-Skail joint venture that doesn't involve

any British people and consists of a fucking PEO box, basically. Oh, rack off me fucking smora, brood. So Peter Kyle, from the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, meets with N-scale, the the N-scale CEO. Yeah, just a regular, ordinary, homegrown Australian-Norwegian accent, I detect. On January 8th, 2025, five days before the AI action plan I quoted on January 13th. And that this AI action plan name checks him multiple times. The only other organizations meeting with Kyle are like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI. Oh my God, they did the Assassin's Creed 1 social stealth. They folded themselves into the center of a group of monks and just war.

walked past Peter Kyle's sort of mental security? It's incorporated on May 29, 2024 with no presence in the UK. Eight months later, it's one of our leading AI companies. Google, Microsoft, Open AI, one Australian Norwegian man. Yeah. These are the greats. The Titans. And also, this is, a lot of this is actually well covered in Computer Weekly as well.

My computer way more often than that. You're like a supercomputer. It's a homegrown computing superstar, like I say, only is the British subsidiary of an Australian Norwegian venture with a board of directors based almost exclusively outside the company. And also it never grew, built or did anything here. And the funny thing is, each time N-scale is name-checked, it goes for more money and its valuation goes up. Yeah, of course it does because the government, like the government that issues the money is putting out something being like, these guys, solid gold. Yeah. Genuinely.

And it goes further than that even. But N-scale gets like six days after that speech. They go for a Series A funding and now they're worth like $600 million. But a Series A funding for what? Because they haven't bought a scaffolding yard, which you don't need hundreds of millions of pounds to two. Oh, of course. This is because they're eventually going to need a lot of money to build God and nobody wants to miss out. But also, if you think about it, they haven't even decided where they're going to like park next to

the building where they build got. They haven't even got the parking. But like the way to think about this is that like everyone putting in that money, right, that $600 million dollar valuation, which meant that like they must have gotten a couple hundred million. It's like, I'm standing in front of you and I'm like, listen, give me $150 million. And when you do, I will do the coolest like triple backflip you've ever seen in your life. Now I might look like an overweight podcast who's never done any acrobatics in her life. But just trust me on this one. Me and my good friend, Peter Kyle, will back me up on this, right?

I can do this and you just have to believe, right? I am up there with some of the greatest gymnasts in the world. And then I guess you give me the money and I go, okay, I'm going to start considering how to do the backflot. Yeah, essentially, yes. But the great thing is, if you're in at the Series A at that valuation, then based on another series of announcement the government made, Their investment in your backflip went up, and I'm not joking, 350,000%. Okay, so I have a question. Uh-huh.

Yes. Assuming that not everyone involved in this is completely stupid. Yeah. What you have created here is a free money generator through the simple expedient of, I don't want to say frauds. I don't want to say scamming. I don't want to say lying. Optimism.

Yeah, through extreme. Some would say delusion. optimism. Yes. Right. And just, this is a very useful thing until people figure it out, until like the Guardian comes knocking. And this is really funny to be like, what we've done is we've got a kind of perpetual motion machine so long as nobody looks at how it works. Essentially, yes. I wonder if this bears any relationship to the broader AI market. I don't think so. Okay. I didn't check. I don't know why I was raising my voice like that then. kind of out of taking quite 90 now. I don't imagine. Don't imagine it would. I'm not going to bother checking though. I assume it doesn't. Sam Altman seems honest. The thing is, right, I can imagine, right, if you had invested a lot of money and you were getting sort of free money

from this, you would then have a very direct material interest in ensuring that everybody thinks that like this company can build God, I can do the triple backflip, whatever, right? And you might sort of really, really seek to obscure any information that it can't. again, but you're telling me there aren't sort of parallels to the sort of broader economy. I mean, what are the odds that there would be? Yeah. Does lightning strike twice? Come on.

Well, especially like, it certainly doesn't have the same purported business. You know, the same purported claim. I'm certain it doesn't involve any of the same people. Sorry, egg on my face because the net, I'm afraid all that, my flippancy, I think, might have been incorrect. I does involve the same people, actually, and it is actually pairs an enormous resemblance to the broader economy and indeed the sector, because I just saw what I put in the notes, and I guess forgot about for a moment, which is September 2025, after Tech UK, the following article is written on CNBC days before they raise again at 2.2 billion.

AI startup end scale came out of nowhere and is blowing away Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. What didn't you know it? I could. What are they going to the odds? He's involved in this too. I have a question. Yes, please. Which may be the Famatrix. If you are Jezun-Hung, right, if you are someone who is in on the sort of big version of this, right? Are you investing in this sort of smaller scale version of the bubble?

Knowing that it's bullshit, but its bullshit will sort of further your bullshit. Or are you sort of in that position because you are oblivious enough to really be a true believer? I think it's actually weirdly both. I fucking love capitalism. We're going to get to why in a minute. And this is sort of part of where we're drawing a few things together, I think. So this is the article September 2025, Tech UK, CNBC. Nscale finds itself at the center of the action, the hottest market on the planet, artificial intelligence.

And it has close to 700 million in fresh capital from Nvidia, the world's most valuable company. At this point, I might buy the scaffolding. I might put a building up. To be fair. You know, there's an incredible arbitrage opportunity, realistically, that everybody missed, even the world's most sophisticated investors, which is, okay, you now know, right, that they have publicly claimed to have bought a site in Loudoun. You could find out what site they've claimed to buy through a FOIA because they would have

had to say that to the government to, like, get into their AI growth zone, right? You would then see, oh, wow, they're claiming to have done all of this. now have all this money, all this riding on the supercomputer in Louton. I see they haven't bought it. I would like to purchase your scaffolding yard, please. It's like you let the Google.com lapse. I'm just like, well, I guess I own Google.com now. I'll sell it back to you.

Gazumping something that is, you know, meant to have like billions of dollars invested in it. You should, like, honestly, if you have a multi-billion dollar company, you shouldn't be able to get Gazumped. Britain moment, you know, such things just happen in Essex property markets. It's a remarkably quick rise for a company that wasn't even around when OpenAI kicked off the generative AI boom with Chad CBT in 2022. At that time, what's now N-scale was part of Arcon Energy, which was established a year earlier to provide infrastructure for cryptocurrency mining.

Again, nobody was like, hey, is it reasonable that they're like a national champion? Yeah, is it reasonable to ask the question, what infrastructure did they provide? because it seems like mostly they just kind of like let out the infrastructure. Yeah, they bought infrastructure from others, then leased it. Like, all they, they were landlords. Genuinely, Microsoft headlined the UK announcement, committing $15.5 billion of new investment to computing equipment, saying it plans to work with N-scale to construct what will be the UK's largest supercomputer in Loughton.

Remember. Remember that for a moment. So when it goes live in Q1, 2027, it will generate 50 megawatts of AI capacity, scalable to 90, said N-scale. Microsoft President Brad Smith said on Tuesday, no one can make that kind of capital investment unless they've got somebody already committed to spend the money once the work is complete. And that's the role we're playing.

It's like, yeah, you couldn't do this kind of impossible bullshit unless you had this from us, you know? Maybe that should be a warning sign. Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, revealed on Wednesday that the chipmaker had $683 million equity investment into N-scale, saying, We convinced ourselves that N-scale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the UK. I think that's a bit of a Freudian slip, you know?

We convinced ourselves. Yeah, genuinely. It's genuinely strange phrasing. Also, by the way, the investment from NVIDIA was in the form of chips and the investment from Microsoft is another informant of intention to purchase compute capacity. So, by the way, that 15 and a half billion, at the time of Tech UK last September, which was the big tech summit in the UK, we were saying, oh, yeah, we're going to have 30 billion pounds of investment from international tech giants. A bunch of it was this. A bunch of it

centered on the scaffolding yard. Yeah. So much of that announcement of huge investment into the UK was the scaffolding yard. That's where it is. So Nick Patience, AI practice lead at the, at the Futurum Group, told CNBC, yep, great name. At Nscale is quote, a key part of NVIDIA is push in the UK market and an acknowledgement by the government that it has to do something to get a generative AI infrastructure built here, which has been a long slog. And eight days after this article is published, N-Scales mentioned several more times, the tech prosperity plan. Valuation raises again at $1.1.1 billion. I said $2.2. That happens later. Just one, $1.1 billion, like, more money than you can kind of readily imagine for nothing. Well, scaffolding yard.

An idea to do something. An idea to maybe buy a scaffolding yard. Yeah, the imagination. Right. Correct, yes. Going to Dragon's Den, right, and going, I want to buy a scaffolding yard so that I can build God on it. And they give me a billion quid. And then I don't buy the fucking scaffolding yard. You know what?

I'm in. But by March, the 2.2 story was they raised $2.2.2 billion for evaluation of $14.6 billion. So by March, they're worth $14.6 billion. Look at all the economic activity that this healthy business does, right? It sort of raises huge amounts of investment and then does nothing. And the point of valuing a business is to be able to check the homework. And it's almost as if all of these people have just been marking their own homework time after time for years. And more than that, the investments that Invidia was putting in was in the form of money that was earmarked to buy NVIDIA chips.

Oh, my favorite shape is a circle. It just round-tripped the money right on through there. And the UK again was announcing round-trip financing of our quote-to-quote sovereign AI champion that was mostly Norwegian and Australian as some kind of huge investment in and vote of confidence in the UK as an international destination. Don't worry, British people. The economy is saved because big thumbs up, these Norwegian Australians want to run an investment laundering. Essentially, yes. Through a scaffolding yard, they are too lazy to buy.

More or less, yeah. That's basically the shape of it. I can't get over it. Why wouldn't you just buy the scaffolding yard? This is the real stumbling block for me, right? It's like any other country, right, you run this scam. And yeah, sure, it deflates eventually. But, like, here, we didn't even run, they didn't even run the scam.

Keep that in mind. Do keep that in mind. But before we get there, this is from TechCrunch. This is around the time, this giant raise $2.2.2 billion to value it at 14.8. The raise was supported by Goldman and J.P. Morgan, whose involvement has been interpreted as IPO preparation and not without reason. N-scale CEO, Josh Payne, told the New York Times, his company would seek to go public as early as this year to generate even more capital. Again, for what, who knows? Just going public to be like, yeah, it's Thing Corp, it's lit.

We make the stuff. We make God, maybe, I guess, at some point, but we do that offsite. No, you can't see the site. Isn't going public meant to invite more scrutiny of the sort that was, you know, ostensibly done and then mugged by one Guardian journalist with a phone? I think they thought they would just figure it out. Alongside its funding and plans, the company also announced, Get Ready for some throwbacks.

The company also announced that former meta-C-O. Cheryl Sandberg, former Yahoo President Susan Decker, and former UK deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg are joining its board. Yes, let's fucking go. So is there a way to understand these, if not as like lobbying? Right? Absolutely. We reinvest a little bit of the like billions of sort of like fake money that we have for no

reason into paying a kind of generous salary for Nick Clegg to do fuck all. Nick Clegg's on the board of so many venture capital firms and big tech companies. Now, he's like inescapable. I get sent because I get sent. Do you think that if I reached out to Nick Clegg being like, listen to here, you're lying piece of shit, I want my student loans back? Given that he has, you know, potentially a hookup for infinite money, he could divert some of them, might be.

Yeah. What if it's like, hey, instead of, could we say that we're building the AI supercomputer on Nova's student loans where they once stood? Listen, I'll fucking like buy a sort of square foot of land in Scotland on one of those like you get to be the laird of it website and you can build God there. Yeah, really tall and really thin. Yeah. You know, a thousand mile high, one foot square god. I will give you, I am prepared to sell you the exclusive rights to do this for, I don't know what I should.

It's like only a couple of million pounds. And that's a bargain. It's the god that if it falls over, the entirety of the UK is destroyed. But this is where, so we're going to have, like, where's Jensen Huang coming in with all this, right? Because he's super important to the story in a way the Guardian doesn't really pick up on because sovereign compute is basically his idea. Oh, by the way, why do you go public is because everyone who's invested so far needs exit liquidity. So everyone who's put in money at these various

raises needs to foist this now in the general public so they can profit from the hype, essentially. Oh, okay. That's why you're going to be. It's to be a second order rub. Exactly. And that's you and me. Yeah, that's us. And also like pension funds that invest in this stuff and so on. Oh, fuck.

Yeah, no, your pension doesn't exist anymore because you invested in... You invested all of the pension fund in not a scaffolding yard. By the way, this is the kind of thing that Rachel Reeves knew pension rules would encourage your pension fund to invest in. Yeah, because it seems like growth, right? And this was... But all of the thing is like, we know. like one way to stimulate growth, which is public investment, we don't want to do that. So we're going to try the one that we know doesn't work, which is let businesses do whatever

they want. And whatever they want is scams, especially now. It's only scams, basically. Because that's the only thing that turns a profit in the sort of year of our lord tendency of the rate of profit to fall 2026. I was also sort of wondering whether like part of, it's not to sort of say that the government was sort of hoodwinked, but they've been very adamant about trying to sort of like get the AI revolution to happen quite quickly. And like when Stama came in, I think one of his first like initiatives or I don't know what you would call it, but he was basically saying that like construction on like data projects and data centers would be fast-tracked and would to avoid like nimbism.

And I wondered whether like this was sort of like an effect of that approach, which was just like, well, you have this company where you have like these guys who like apparently have a company. that doesn't really exist and have not built anything. But by the strength of like vaguely worded emails and being able to convince this new government, but oh yeah, we're going to be able to like build you the supercomputer in Essex. And it's going to have like an Essex accent and everything. They were just like sort of willing to oversee like how does this business, like overlook how does this business work?

Because, you know, I think again, like it reflects a broader sort of problem with the AI sort of industry in that number one. It doesn't really exist. But like as much as it does exist, it is. it is kind of people hyping each other up and convincing themselves that they're about to embark, they're about to sort of like get the thing and convincing enough people who are dependent on that to just like look away from what they can actually see, which is just a bunch of scaffolding on the floor. I mean, when you want to talk about who benefits, like the government, of course,

benefits from nobody asking questions about this thing because it validates their narrative for another day. This is all they really care about because they govern by press release. But I want to talk about and so basically we've established what the financial incentives are, which is every time the UK says we're going to, we re-endorse N-scale as like our sovereign compute partner,

basically. The only thing they've, they've never endorsed anyone else as a sovereign compute partner, only N-scale. Then N-scale re-raises money at a higher valuation. And their end game seems to have been to go public. We also know they've never really done anything that would justify any of the,

those valuations other than just get mentioned in press releases a lot, and the scaffolding yard is still a scaffolding yard. So where and why does Jensen Huang come into this, other than just speaking at conferences? Some of this is conjecture. I'm hitting the sum of this is conjecture alarm, but make the conjecture detective arriving on the scene. So sovereign compute is basically Jensen Huang's idea. It's one of the ways he thought of of inventing a public sector facing business line for Nvidia and he thought of it in late 2023 and then spent 2024 largely touring the world

telling different countries they needed a sovereign compute capacity that would have to buy Nvidia chips fuck I just uncritically accepted it as an idea earlier but like so like he sells you the idea of like no you need British GPT right

your Claude is not transphobic enough you know it's probably going to turn into Claudina pretty soon so like you need some kind of like British chud AI capacity and then uses the kind of designated firm that's going to do that which is not going to do that

because it's a stupid idea that's impossible because you can't build anything in this country to increase the value of his own investments and then exit that and stick it on everyone who's stupid enough to invest when it goes public. I'd say I 95% agree with that. I think a lot of it is just

to create more customers for Nvidia And then Nvidia just gets not, because it's with him, like, Nvidia is so rich and is that it almost doesn't matter if those companies go public or not. That's kind of for the other investors. What he cares about is now a bunch of countries that have access to money printers have an infinite need to buy Nvidia chips forever. This is parasitical. Yeah, 100%. This is where I'm saying, I'm kind of going beyond existing reporting on this. But for that last bit to work, right? For them to, you know, for the UK to be buying a video chips forever. They need to buy the scaffolding out. So we will get this is, there's a, I'll get to

that part in involvement because we do get to that. Just like a gang of leather jacketed assassins heading to Norway right now. So he said in late 2023, every country should have its own AI system trained on domestic data, align with national values and built using local infrastructure. And this is something that technology ministers around the world repeat all. almost word for word, like 80 to 90% word for word. Throughout Europe, throughout the Middle East, South Korea, Canada, like this statement gets repeated. And countries that aren't the U.S. and aren't China start picking domestic AI winners to be their sovereign compute partner. And in 2025, when he comes to London, what does he do? He says alongside Starmor and Starmor sort of

endorses what he says, AI is a technology and also an infrastructure. and the AI remains the, in the UK remains the largest AI ecosystem in the world without its own infrastructure. The UK needs to be an AI maker, not an AI taker. And these kinds of things also get said by Peter Kyle, right? It's not, in no point did, like, did Jensen Huang go meet with Peter Kyle and say, right? No, he doesn't need to. Yeah, this is a fucking mind virus. So, so like I say, that the concept of a sovereign AI in the UK policy mix didn't come from September 2021, 25. It came from sometime in 2024 when Matt Clifford was writing the AI action plan, but Matt Clifford would have been either knowing Jensen Huang or embedded in the same circles as Jensen Huang, and so exposed to

the idea that Jensen Huang was selling. And what's better in a national AI action plan, because you don't really know what it's going to be as, well, I guess we should probably build some data centers, which is basically every national AI action plan. And there's one game in town for buying chips to build data centers, which is fucking NVIDIA. And it's, it's so, so funny to make yourself more dependent on NVIDIA using the language of like sovereignty. Yeah, exactly. Because what you're doing is you're essentially a local company will purchase an American

chip to rent compute capacity largely to American companies. And that's sovereign, I guess. Yeah, whereas if you wanted to do something that was actually, sovereign, you would be like, we're going to have to do the incredibly expensive thing of public investment in some kind of like competitor to NVIDIA. Yeah, unthinkable. British chips, you know? Yeah, prong cocktail, they could call it.

They call it crisps. The crisp maker prawn cocktail. Awful. Thank you. But basically, this concept of Huang more or less invented himself basically becomes mimetic. One he endorses and he profits from enormously. He dumps chips into end scale, right, to like juice it to get it moving. And the British government couldn't stop supporting it because it was the success story they desperately needed and wouldn't have gotten any other way.

Yeah, of course it works. It's sort of exactly what any government wants to be able to tell people. Sovereignty sounds good, you know, investment sounds good. We're not spending any of your money. It's like this nice leather jacketed man is coming along and he's going to help us invent British god. And so remember what he says, right? He says, we convinced ourselves that N-scale could be a national champion for AI infrastructure in the UK, which basically is just the huge. They were like, okay, you'll do. You're now going to get chips dumped into you. Please don't forget to buy the scaffolding yard. That's the one thing you have to not do. Fucking typical that they weren't looking for this in Britain and they still had to get an Australian.

But like, the circular round-trip investment, what it does is it basically for free or for the cost of chips supports the British government continuing to double down because they keep announcing that you just keep announcing about it because it's good news story after good news story which is quite hard to come by. Yeah. And so long as you're like building something, so long as you don't forget to buy the scaffolding yard, at a certain point you're in too deep and the government is too. And I imagine it's probably quite difficult to get out of it because you're like, no,

that AI is the constant kind of excuse machine of like, no, we're going to build God with it any second, any second, keep throwing money at it. right? And that all works so long as you buy the scaffolding yard and you put a shed on it with a sign that says God inside may be soon. God inside.

Don't look. No look. Oh my God, we built the cabba. Like at least buy a porter cabin, you know? Yeah, genuinely. But so they've done this in several countries. They pick a neocloud provider, say it's the perfect national champion, invest in it, then desperate governments follow along

you know, desperate for good news. How many times have they done this? About 18. Jesus Christ. Wait a second. So you're telling me that not only are we not getting sort of AI sovereignty, but we were your 18th call? Yeah, we're not high on the list.

That far down, just like, oh, fucking, I don't know, like, is it called Britain? Yeah. Oh, we'll try there. But like, this is being repeated in the EU and Israel with a company called Nebius. You can look this up. Nebius spun out of Yandex, weirdly, the Russian-like Facebook alternative, whose founder denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine and so it lives in Israel and got his sanctions removed. So he, again, gets an investment from Huang, gets talked up at quasi-official events.

Juan gets trotted out, re endorses them. And then, by the way, Nebius is entering the UK market too, so we might even get the duff beer thing with different vats of just Nvidia chips coming out of the same pipe. Hopefully they can at least put a shed up, you know? Because if they're doing this in Israel, then right now, Iran is kind of like wasting missiles blowing up empty data centers on the kind of auspices that there might be something in them. Like, for example, Indonesia, their second largest mobile telecom company is called Oridu Hutchison. Again, they're the sovereign cloud provider for Indonesia that Nvidia has invested in. This is happening with SoftBank in Japan, because remember, they're a telecom company first.

And Germany is happening with Deutsche Telecom and France is happening with Mistr. This is like some kind of Avengers initiative of scams. You know who else likes a tasteful leather jacket is Nick Fury. But can I tell you, the UK, as far as I can tell, is the only one where they forgot. They forgot to build the thing. That is so perfectly typical. I feel proud to be British. Too lazy to even do the scam properly and it just unravels the whole thing.

Jensen Fung's like shopping for an iPatch right now just at ORAFarm and one Australian man with a Norwegian accent is ready to ruin it for him by just being too fucking lazy to buy a yard off some scaffolders. So it's like, why do we keep, why is it, right? If we're counting patents, if we're doing patent recognition, why is this the second time we've found that the UK economy is being premised on a single Australian man who shit doesn't work.

We shouldn't keep relying on that guy. Maybe it's like an pro-Indo-European myth thing, like the divine twins or like, or something like this. We keep looking for our Australian Cinderella, right? Like the one Australian who is going to fix all of it. Well, so in the UK, it's the one Australian man. In India, they call him the far traveler.

It Hittites actually referred to him as the mysterious spinner. It's really interesting. He always comes from far away is the thing about him. And he comes from far away and he engages in a trade that always involves a circle. This is interesting. I knew I could work a proto-Indo-European reference. Why is this guy on the sort of panel of hieroglyphics wearing what appears to be a leather jacket?

Which is like a crocodile leather jacket. Awesome. But yeah, so like there are lots of these. It's just that at the UK, they picked a fake one. as opposed to the other countries where they picked real. Scams. Scams economy wins again. The UK is uninvestable at this point, but it's only because so much of this is short cons

that you can't run a long con here anymore. It's like con city. So anyway, let's go back to the Guardian article. So what are the prospects for it doing anything that it said? Asked how the site would create 750 jobs. N-scale said it didn't know how this figure had been calculated. land records appear that Nscale has not yet been registered as the owner

of the site over a year after the claim purchase Nscale could not say whether they own the land at this point, it could not give a date on which any purchases occurred. So they may not, they still may not own it. Now that this is out, you would hope, because of the gazumping that we discussed, that

this would be an impossible thing to do. It would be, I imagine, quite expensive, because you know that they have a couple billion dollars and they do quite need it. Yeah, and like this bit specific. If you own this scaffolding yard, you are going to be like Mansa Musa, right? Like, this is the most expensive request access to document that has ever occurred in history.

We have accidentally made one Essex property owner like titanically rich overnight. So N-scale has filed per planning permission to build a supercomputer during the last week of February after the Guardian started making inquiries. How do you file planning permission for something on something you don't own? Well? I would think that that would be a planning application. They would have to reject on the grounds that like you can't build God on someone else's house.

The other funny thing is, you know where this was originally reported was in Essex local news? After the January announcement, after the January announcement, they were like a local group got together to start filing objections to the building of the data center. only they found the planning permission hadn't been submitted so there's nothing to object to. You know the movie In the Loop, right? Yes. They do some cheap pathos by trying to juxtapose the start of the war in Iraq with an MP's constituency work where a very kind of like area man-styled Steve Coogan is trying to get his MP on the phone about his neighbor's wall collapsing into his garden, right? those guys, the real versions of them, just unraveling this kind of immense financial disparity, let's say.

I mean, again, in Britain it would be a planning application dispute. Of course it would be. Why wouldn't it be? This is a perfect thing of like, world enveloping financial bullshit brought down by area NIMBY. And honestly, I salute them for it. You don't want to, but they are providing a valuable service. It's like they got Captain Tom, they got fucking. There is a hidden hand in this country that serves to expose the worst abuses of our system. And it's people who object to local planning permission. But that's the funny thing.

They tried to object, but there is no planning permission to object to. Yeah, and that's what they found. So just, here's the thing. Just object to everything. Just go to your local council, whatever it is, scroll all the things, start objecting at random. Honestly, who knows what you'll uncover? Yeah. So, by way of sort of summarizing, right, what did N-scale get from the government?

Well, it was included in multiple AI growth zones, which basically means the government proactively clears planning hurdles for you. Yeah, if you try and jump the hurdles. Yeah. You do have to apply, though. N-scale is named in several, so Stargate UK in the Northeast, which so far is nothing. Colbalt Park, which is an existing business center, and then Loudon, which, again, is a scaffolding yard. It also gets branding as official AI provider to the government or a sovereign compute

entity, which is, again, something dreamed up by Jensen Huang. But this is super important for its economics. Because NVIDIA, the government and N-scale, team up to invent an entirely new category of business, called a sovereign data service provider or whatever, sovereign compute provider. Not an American company like CoreWeave that's not beholden to the interest of the British government or a U.S. subsidiary of a big tech firm, but a British national champion. So think of this when you think that Jetson Wong invented this idea, sold it to policymakers, invested a few hundred million into what he was able to turn into a monopolist in the category he invented, and now it's worth $14.6 billion. Because of course, he invented compute Serco. The only problem is they forgot to build it.

And the government's role in this was to nod all of this through. Yeah. Perhaps maybe at some point suspecting that an enormous amount of money was going to traffic through this and not even ask to get in on the scam because that would be too much like a nanny state thing to do. Essentially, yeah. We didn't, the government didn't ask for a cut of this? Well, the government, well, I guess the government's cut of it. Well, actually, I explain what the cut is now.

The cut is the appearance of growth, right? Genuinely, yeah, that's what the cut is. Because if you look in the most recent OBR reports, and to two most recent OBR publications, they'd say that post financial crisis growth in the UK averages 0.5, but they estimate it will rise to 1% for a number of structural factors, including underlying trends, including the rise of artificial intelligence. You need stuff like that. So the OBR has something to look at to say, hey, look, artificial intelligence is growing. It's generating all these billions of, and billions of investment in growth. It just feeds itself. Yeah. Because then the only, the most rewarding, the only rewarding way to invest into the UK is to do some. shit like this. So you get more growth on paper, but the growth

is entirely, can only ever be illusory. 100%. Because nobody's like, hey, I'm going to invest in a real business in the United Kingdom that does something material, because the only thing that makes money that the government is proactively

clearing the way for is not buying scaffolding yards. Quite. Or not building on land in the northeast. It's called for the thing that's called Stargate that's never been built. And remember, like, the government loves to announce how much investment's coming to the UK, because that makes people optimistic. Microsoft announces it's going to invest $2.5 billion, $30 billion, but how much of that is just a promise to purchase compute from a UK company using American chips? Where's the UK in this other than just the place the chips

happen to be located? Nowhere. This also really contextualizes the kind of briefcase laborism thing of, like, you know how Will Stansel, right, in a sort of past, life used to be of the kind of mindset of like, the numbers are up so why people mad at Biden, right? Like, I threw pennies at this homeless guy and he's mad at me even though he's objectively better off, right? So the labor impulse to be like, growth is up, right? Like, we are, there's significant private investment that we're sort of clearing the way for. And anybody who doesn't feel better off is kind of cheating, you know, is sort of like must just be, you know, maybe, maybe they just want us to do more racism, so we'll do some more racism, we'll do some more

transphobia, right? But like, nobody's, nobody's feeling poor, right? Because they just don't understand the technicalities of this, right? When you look into the technicalities of this, and it's scams. It's a scaffolding yard. It's a scaffolding yard, but a bunch of guys who are like, what do you mean? Our job is to stand here and not scaffold anything. The kind of dunning Krugerness of the kind of purported experts in this going, oh no, we're the sort of serious finance people, you can't do public investment, you know, because that's against the kind of fiscal rules. Having been played like this and playing themselves like this. I mean, and this is also like, you know, it's, it's one way of looking at it is like being played, but the other way of

looking at it is like everyone is sort of mutually benefiting each other if the sort of goal is just to sort of show that there is value on paper and not to ask too many questions about it. And so like the AI companies and the AI industries and this company included, like the infrastructure of the actual building of stuff doesn't matter. What matters is like that they can sort of project some sort of sense of value on paper. But that also applies to the government as well. Like whenever you talk about,

whenever like the rare times when sort of government ministers have been asked like, what is the AI revolution that you want? Like what do you want? Like you're investing all this money, apparently into AI technology. What do you actually want it to do? Like is the objective that everyone does organize

as their shopping lists on there now? Do you want them to sort of like, what do you actually want them to do with this stuff. And they just don't know what to say. Because for them, it's ultimately just like, AI new, AI good. AI is going to like show on paper that we're growing. It's going to like fix the economy. We're back to, we're back to Amazon again. We're back to Protestantism, essentially. But even with Amazon, there's at least this idea that like, okay, it's a company that's so big and does so much, including things that are somewhat material that like, you can

at least sort of say that, okay, yeah, Amazon are going to like fix, like build roads because they have the money to do about, or they'll sort of like redo, you know, they'll kind of build a new post office or something. Like, they'll do something material, even if that's, even that's bullshit. The thing with like the AI industry is that, like, they, no one actually really knows what they're supposed to do. There's just a lot of, like, hype and a lot of sort of hope and faith that, like, they will get the UK and get other countries out of their sort of slump. And so, like, there's an incentive almost, like, look, you know, look away from, like, the reality of it because, like, what do you have you have government ministers like visiting a building site with like scaffolding on the floor

and not really any idea of like how like what to make about right the story the story undermines and so the story you know the story is like the point i'm trying to make is basically like this the way that like i think one of the ways to understand this is ultimately like both the government and ai industries are basically playing the same game the game is very much about projecting sort of fake money or money that is projecting wealth that is only valuable on paper and this has been an inconvenient way

of someone who did a follow-up who basically followed up a phone call and it was just like, hey, isn't it a bit weird that like this plot of land that has nothing on there is worth like I don't know how much. You're not supposed to follow up phone calls because then that collapses the whole thing

because ultimately all of the labor right belief I think when they want to tell themselves that they're good is that when the growth happens, then they're, can be expansive like Tony Blair, but they need the growth to happen, and they need people to believe in it first. And everyone has to believe hard enough. And if you believe hard enough that God is coming, or basically Protestantism, then we get to, when we get to be good, we get to be nice, but we can't. But let's also say, right, let's say Nscale actually built the data

center, God forbid. And that the investment was supposed to do in any way real. There are tons of tenders that exist out there on Find a Tender. You can find them to supply compute to the government. And every way the government positioned end scale was that it was a sort of preferred supplier in all but name. It was the UK's sovereign computer provider. So what if you're the MOD? Jesus Christ, the security implications. We just handed all your data to two, to like two Australian men who have an empty shed. Thank goodness we didn't, because there was nowhere for it to go. I mean, that's almost kind of better in the sense that they can't do anything nefarious with it, because they can't do anything with it.

But like... I guess we could write it down and put it in the scaffolding yard. We could just write down a list of everything about us and mail it to the scaffolding yard. Get done for breaking and entering because you don't own the scaffolding yards. So, but like, genuinely,

what if you're the MOD, right? And you're handling, or what if you're handling sensitive data on UK citizens like you're the NHS? You need to, you will be pressured, presumably, to use the sovereign compute provider of choice.

That's what I think all the other analysis, including that of the Guardian, kind of missed. Because N-scale was being set up, to be BAE Systems. Because BAE Systems wins about 16% of contracts at the MOD, which is way more than any other individual supplier. And those contracts, 96% of them, are non-competitive procurements.

Not because the government says BAE has to win, rather they win because they're the, quote, sovereign defense partner in their decades of national champion designation, means the government simply has a structural preference for them. Yeah, and BAE might build the sort of AFV that, like, wiggles your brain apart and gives you Havana syndrome. but at least they build it, right? Like, at least there is a tangible thing

that is giving soldiers brain damage, right? Like, I, and at least BAE have been around for more than two minutes, so people know that they're not just two Australians. Yeah. And the idea right here is that BAE systems in the government were co-created the modern MOD. The intention is that N-scale and D-SIT

co-create the modern D-Sit and how it procures stuff. I cannot be more clear about this. The government was in effect setting itself up to pre-purchase from a data warehouse that hadn't been built on land that it might not have owned by a company whose only proven operational capability was running a Bitcoin mine and a fjord. And they were setting them up to be an sort of unofficial national monopoly at the indirect behest of Jensen Huang, who endorsed it in every turn, round-tripped his money through it a few times and it just made him richer. The monopoly for all of this was granted in all but name before the monopolist had even

demonstrated any capacity to supply the product. It was being granted a monopoly to sell. This is, this is, Riley. Yes. You, you, they should give you a Pulitzer or an order of Lenin or something for this. But think about this. Everyone's incentives point in the same direction. Pretend the thing is real, because as you were saying, they're saying, right? N-scale's executive as an investor, get free press and higher valuations. The government gets to justify its program of non-investment because they can point to the wizard and say he's coming. and we get loads of renderings and task forces and plans and so on. It's comp stat.

It's like comp stats. And as a kind of structural thing, as like a kind of strategic national priority or whatever, right, to be like, we're not even going to go through the motions of checking. Yeah. Because if we did, we might find out that nothing's there and that ruins what we really wanted to get out of it, which was press releases. Because when you are a scammer, and by the way, I'm saying that about the UK government. government, right? When you are that and you need to continue selling people on the wrong, on this idea that non-investment is necessary, that's the scam I'm talking about. The roll, Marygo Round just has to keep going. One more rotation. You figure out how you're going to get the next

rotation on that rotation. And so if you get the press releases, if you get the OBR, great, you're fine. You'll figure out the rest tomorrow. And everyone is just incentivized to all work together without needing to coordinate, and they're all incentivized to lie a bit, be a little too optimistic. To say, oh, we can build this in nine months. Doesn't matter we haven't bought the thing yet. The merry-go-round goes around for just one more turn, then you figure out the story you need to tell tomorrow and again and again and again. And remember, like I said earlier, N-scale was hiring underwriters. They wanted to take this scaffold yard and press release public and foisted on any sucker who'd bail out the original investors. That was the plan. I am speaking directly here to

the United Kingdom government in the person of Peter Kyle and Kirstama. If you think you may have been a victim of fraud, you can get advice by calling 0300-123-2040. But like, here's the thing. At some point, somebody is you need to build something or do something

or make something if anything is supposed to be different. No, they won't. They just won't. Again, we're sort of the only thing it's possible to do is the impossible. Or in this case, the fraudulent. the non-existent. Or at least put up a scaffold. Maybe that was it.

They couldn't find anyone who could put up the scaffolding because they're either like crypto guys or they're too woke. Yeah. All the scaffolding guys stop scaffolding because they just started investing in crypto. Anyway, I drove myself insane with N-scale and I've driven you insane with N-scale. This is happening everywhere. Yeah, apparently. Like in your country, if it is not the UK,

this is still being done by basically the same people. It's just we were the only place to see. stupid to follow through on the, like, next step of the scam. Can we have the outro be Rule Britannia, please? Uh-huh. Can we get, can we have the outro be, uh, die straight as money for nothing? Anyway, thank you very much for being a bonus episode subscriber. I hope I haven't driven you mad.

You've driven me something I think different than mad. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't know. I don't understand anymore. something, yes. Yeah, we definitely knocked a little feeling loose. Look, but thank you very much

for listening to TF. I hope you enjoyed this magical mystery tour through a bunch of stuff that mostly didn't happen. Well, it's like jazz. It's about the scaffolding ounce you don't buy.

But before we go, I want to make an announcement from a little parallel universe. A municipal. Be gay, solve crimes. No, different one. Fuck.

Well, there's your problem. No, a different one. No. 10,000 posts. A municipal universe because in April 25th and 26th, Maddie Lubchanski is coming to London and Nova, Maddie and I are going to do three shows in two days of no gods, no mayors. And all of us have secret plans to really jazz up the shows. So it's going to get real baroque. We're going to get so stupid with it. Yeah.

So I cannot waste. If you are in London, the ticket link will be posted soon. possibly by the time this episode comes out. So please do, if you want to come see us perform three shows of no gods, no mayors. We're going to be doing that in London on April 25th and 26th. So anyway, thank you very much for listening.

And we will see you on the free episode. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye.