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Sovereignty Is Not About Ownership
A vice-president at a Canadian university called me last month. Her president had told her the institution needed to be on sovereign AI within the year. The provincial government had announced a funding program. Other universities were already applying. She wanted to know what she should be evaluating. I asked her what sovereign meant in this context. She paused for a long time. Then she said, "I think it means the data stays in Canada." I asked what about it staying in Canada specifically
Read storyFounder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.
Latest Essays
What I'm thinking about right now.
One Rack Is a Cloud
What colocation is, and why most AI founders have never heard of it
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You Want Out of OpenAI. Here's Where to Actually Start.
A week ago, I published AI Real Estate. The framing was simple: the AI you use today is rented — like an apartment. There's a ladder above it. Most people don't know the ladder exists. The response was the part I didn't expect. Dozens of people messaged me with versions of the same question. I read it. I get it. I want out. Where do I actually start? Some were lawyers. Some were founders. Some were accountants and consultant
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Three Kinds of Cloud (and Why Two of Them Keep Getting Confused)
I sat down with a Canadian university last week. They were trying to articulate to industry partners what their compute offering would be. They knew "sovereign" was the right word. They couldn't define it for a buyer. They couldn't tell me what a partner would actually use it for that they couldn't already do on AWS in Montreal. That's not the university's failure. The industry calls three different things "cloud" and lets two
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What I Did
This is Chapter 6 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Own Your Tech
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Hardware Sovereignty Is the New Data Sovereignty
After I wrote about trying to buy a Mac Studio and failing, the replies kept circling the same question. "If I can't buy the hardware and I don't trust the cloud, what am I supposed to do?" That question led me somewhere I didn't expect. I Checked What GPUs You Can Actually Get in Canada Not the marketing pages. Not the pricing calculators either. The actual hardware you can spin up today in a Canadian data center. I went t
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AI Real Estate: From Apartment to Mansion
AI Real Estate: From Apartment to Mansion A $3,999 Mac Studio runs a 122 billion parameter AI model on your desk. Running the same model on AWS costs roughly $5 an hour. About $3,700 a month if you leave it on. The Mac pays for itself in five weeks. A $3,999 Mac Studio runs a 122B parameter AI model locally. Running that same model on AWS: $5/hour. ~$3,700/month if you leave it on. The Mac pays for itself in five weeks. I
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AWS and Google Cloud Are Designed to Keep You. Here's What We Do Instead.
When my startup was brand new, both AWS and Google Cloud felt like gifts. Our incubator had relationships with both. The credits were generous. The onboarding was smooth. We didn't pay a dollar out of pocket for months. It felt like they were investing in us. They weren't. They were investing in our dependency. I didn't understand that then. I do now. What You're Actually Paying For I want you to try something. Strip away
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Own or Be Owned
In the AI economy, you're on one side of the split. This is how to find out which.
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The case for building a life nobody can revoke — money, jurisdiction, identity.
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A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
You Cannot Buy What Can Only Be Built
Meta spent $14.3 billion last year to buy half of a data labeling company. They made its 28-year-old CEO the head of their Superintelligence Lab. Gave him a title that didn't exist six months before. Put him above researchers who'd been doing AI before he was in high school. Nine months later, his team reports to other people. A new group controls the data pipelines. The researchers he was supposed to lead are leaving. And the
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Why I'm fine-tuning a small model (and why it runs on your laptop)
I'm training an AI model. It's going to run on a laptop. Three weeks ago I would have told you I was training a 70-billion-parameter model, the kind of thing that needs a data center to breathe. I'm not. I'm training a 4-billion-parameter model that runs on a Mac Mini. If the smaller one works, a larger companion model may follow. But the 4B is the bet. This is the first post in a series where I'll share what I'm building, why,
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Recent threads
The latest from @TheGeorgePu.
Canada's AI hardware reality check — what's actually available vs. what founders think they can buy.
GPU shipping is the tell. If you can't physically own the compute, you don't own your AI stack.
I only write code when it's 10/10 important. Slowing down is the real productivity move in 2026.
Mac Studio supply is crunched. Apple's quietly rationing M3 Ultra — AI builders feel it first.
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