An Independent AI Nation in the Sea to Bypass Regulations — Or So We Were Told

The Blue Sea Frontier Computer Cluster (BSFCC) is a supercomputer situated in international waters — a giant floating data center containing thousands of NVIDIA GPUs.

It is so big that it can operate as a separate nation and can provide artificial intelligence (AI) power to any corporation or government across the globe.

The purpose is to tap into the power of its tens of thousands of NVIDIA’s H100 GPUs to train and deploy the “next generation of large-scale AI models.”

And as it’s out to sea, it doesn’t have to deal with the latest regulations, such as Biden’s last Executive Order, which the creators of Del Complex  describe as “draconian” and “decelerationist.”

Del Complex: The First Sovereign AI Nation

Worth over $5000 million, BSFCC is a cyclopean barge built by the US company Del Complex. It contains 10,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and its purpose is to deploy “large-scale AI models” and “nation-state-as-a-service” to anyone who wants to pay for this service.

It boasts advanced water cooling systems and a fully solar-powered energy grid. To ensure the safety of the platform and its personnel from “kinetic attacks” at all times, it even has its own army. BSFCC is protected by a resident population of Xio Sky Security Solutions operators and a whole army of armed contractors from partner nations.

Del Complex announced on X (formerly Twitter) that it wants BSFCC to regulate itself with its own laws and that it is “part of the global resilience efforts” of this company. They aim to “accelerate human potential through the symbiosis of AGI, neural prosthetics, robotics, clean energy, resilience solutions, and fundamental scientific research.”

However, they prefer to walk this anarchic route of a floating self-regulated palace of technology since governmental interference only wants to “centralize control under the guise of safety.” That is beyond the fact that any government regulation is bound “to lag behind the times, not keep ahead of it,” according to them.

The Truth About Del Complex – If There is One

With us so far? A sovereign island powered by and furthering the use of AI?

Does all that sound extremely… far-fetched? Well, it must be true, as a quick search of Google News will show many large tech magazines reporting it at face value.

But a closer look shows something is wrong here. The images from the platform are actually elaborations of photos of the Estrella del Mar III, a floating power plant built by Siemens Energy for the State of Santo Domingo.

The name BlueSea Frontier Computer Cluster strongly resembles that of Blue Frontiers, a project for creating completely unconstrained artificial islands in the sea of French Polynesia where payment would have been made in cryptocurrencies.

That project, conceived by the Seasteading Institute founded by Peter Thiel (one of the founders of PayPal and among the first external investors in Facebook), never evolved past a dream roughly a decade ago.

If we check their e-commerce page where they sell “employee ID badges” and we scan the QR code, it only sends the reader to the homepage of the website instead of being a proper personal identifier.

In simpler terms, yes, this is all a giant piece of fake news, taken at face value by many news websites and presumably their readers.

But is it really fake? All of it? Well, that’s a bit more complex than it seems.

As Vice correctly pointed out, not everything about Del Complex is made up, so what’s under this apparent satirical façade? What are the motivations of Del Complex?

Let’s Keep Digging

We do not know if the BlueSea Frontier Computer Cluster is merely a joke, a hoax to make fun of time-poor and superficial press.

Another option is that BSFCC might be just a big provocation launched precisely during the days of the AI Safe Summit, the global summit on artificial intelligence attended by heads of state worldwide.

Another more interesting angle is that Del Complex, which describes itself as an “alternate reality corporation,” has built this distorted and dystopic reality for a message or perhaps to create an engaging community in the vein of SCP, an alternative reality, a crowd-written collection of dystopian horrors.

Taking a stroll into their website is a trip into cursed AI images and truly mind-boggling information that almost looks like the product of a sci-fi novel.

Some of the pictures of the employees clearly seem to be the product of generative AI, and we cannot but notice a particular obsession with twins that appears everywhere.

Reading about their almost entirely redacted Incident Report also generates an unadulterated “WTF” sensation that contributes to the general dream-like feeling of the website and its nearly Lynch-esque atmosphere.

If we follow the URL root of this link to the parent company website of Xio Sky, the security contractors, and find an empty website (Google indexed only two pages) with a simple, enigmatic motto: “Moonless sky. Swords in shadow.”

There’s a lot of content out there — it’s a well-put-together package that, at first glance, can suck you into thinking it’s legitimate while creating an uneasy feeling of dread.

The Bottom Line

Could Del Complex’s project be just a complex hoax made to show how good they are at simulating alternate reality settings to sell their services later on?

Or is it a sarcastic take to show how an AI can generate an entire and thoroughly believable “corporation” from scratch and trick the world into believing it?

One thing that we could say for sure, though, is that AI is helping bring fake news to an entirely new level. And it has to be the duty of the press to discriminate and verify when a claim pops up out of nowhere rather than running it at face value.

It’s the turn of humans to stay ahead of the curve and be able to discriminate reality from fiction with our own senses and intuition.

But, as far as we know, there’s no artificial island powered by tens of thousands of NVIDIA chips operating outside international law, trying murky AI experiments.

If you see it reported with a straight face elsewhere, feel free to chuckle and move on.