Tech Billionaires’ Craziest Inventions—And Which Ones Might Actually Save the World (5 of 6)

Peter Thiel’s floating “seastead” micro-nations

The Seasteading Institute, founded in 2008 and partly funded early on by Peter Thiel, promotes the idea of permanent, politically autonomous communities floating in international waters. One headline project was a proposed floating city off Tahiti, made of modular concrete platforms with housing, offices, and sustainable infrastructure. The project stalled amid political and public pushback, and large-scale seasteads have not materialized so far. The idea, however, remains a touchstone in tech-libertarian circles: trying out different governance models by literally sailing away from existing nation-states is an interesting way to solve quite a few potential problems.

Jensen Huang’s planet-scale AI supercomputer farms

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang often describes next-generation data centers as “AI factories” whose main product is tokens—the units of text, images, or other data that AI models generate. NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU architecture and related systems are explicitly marketed as building blocks for these AI factories, designed to run massive generative AI workloads.

The company is backing this rhetoric with huge infrastructure plans: from U.S. AI supercomputer “factories” in Texas to a roughly $100 billion partnership with OpenAI to build large AI data centers providing around 10 gigawatts of compute capacity. Huang has argued that, over time, most big companies will operate both traditional factories and AI factories side by side.