A Must-Read potpourri: the ‘math’ of AI data center builds, healthcare AI failures, telehealth in schools, Hippocratic AI’s problems, the loss of empathy.

May 14, 2026 | by | 1 Comment

Your Editor will be Away From The Desk more than a bit over the next two weeks that lead up to the US Memorial Day holiday. I’ve collected seven articles to read and consider over the next few days. Enjoy!

Where Are All The Data Centers?

Author: Ed Zitron.  Self-published on Where’s Your Ed At?

If you’re puzzled about the ‘math’ of data centers–what capacity is available now, what is actually online/operational, and what’s the pipeline like–you will appreciate the detail that Mr. Zitron has gone to in cataloging those and much more. It turns out that we are not in the Land of Math, but in the Land of Myth, ruled by the Great Oz.

Despite what the builders say, and Microsoft’s and Oracle’s ever-cheery press releases, operational data centers are a fraction of what’s needed now or projected. The centers take 18-24 months to build and then many more months to fit out with chips, cooling, power, and networking that links sites and the end users. The AI giants, despite all the money flowing their way, will run out of money before the operating capacity they need gets online. Every data center takes 18-24 months to build, and even with retrofitting older data centers, the capacity is not there, nor for some time to come. In other words, the cavalry is in a neighboring country, much less the next state. Nobody has yet built a 1 GW data center. Centers are in megawatts and that, not many. 

FTA:

  • “Oracle is building 7.1GW of total capacity for OpenAI, and keeps — laughably! — saying 2027 or 2028, when at this rate, Stargate Abilene won’t be done until mid-2027, and the rest either never get finished or are done in 2030 or later.”
  • “This is setting up a horrifying situation where Oracle desperately needs OpenAI to pay it for capacity that doesn’t exist, and if it ever gets built, it’s likely to be years after OpenAI has run out of money, which is the same problem that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have with their $748 billion of deals with Anthropic and OpenAI, though thanks to the $340 billion or more necessary to build the Stargate data centers, Oracle’s problems are far more existential.”

The article also makes the point that Oracle does not have the fall-back businesses that Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have to cushion the blow of AI failure. Oracle has the burden of a massive debt load, the most recent being financed by a large bond fund since banks wouldn’t touch it. Will Larry Ellison sell a yacht or an island? Oracle Steps Back From The Debt Brink and Oracle’s Rock and Hard Place in Abilene

This is one long, well-written, and researched analysis by Mr. Zitron, whose expertise is in PR and is a well-known Silicon Valley critic. 

Telehealth in Schools: Expanding Student Access in a Hybrid Health Care System

Author: Paul Samargedlis. Published on Telehealth.org

Healthcare shortages across the US are affecting K-12 schools and children’s health. School-based telehealth programs can reduce absenteeism, expand access to mental health care, and deliver preventive care, bringing that care to where children already are. School-based telehealth programs in states such as Texas and North Carolina have demonstrated measurable improvements in attendance and emergency department utilization. Much will have to change in coordinating efforts and obtaining funding among school systems, local providers, and governments.

Artificial Intelligence Acquisitions: Agencies Should Collect and Apply Lessons Learned to Improve Future Procurements

Author: Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report to Congressional Requesters. April 2026 (49 pages)

Federal agencies reportedly more than doubled their use of artificial intelligence (AI) from 2023 to 2024, and they used a range of approaches to acquire additional AI capabilities through fiscal year 2025. In April 2025, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance to help agencies acquire AI responsibly, but agencies have not by and large shared that knowledge. This paper attempts to fill this gap in part. GAO identified trade-offs, challenges and benefits. The paper identifies approaches agencies made in acquisition and makes recommendations.

Top AI Failures in Healthcare

Author: Dmitrii Gorbunov. Published on LinkedIn.

Mr. Gorbunov sums up five costly failures (or about to be failures) where AI has been used in healthcare: physician decision overrides (UnitedHealthcare), claims denials (Cigna), fabrications of consent documents (Sharp Healthcare), and adding diagnostic codes without physician confirmation (Kaiser Permanente). The fifth one, Doctronic, was spoofed by Mindguard to issue triple the dose of Oxycontin [TTA 26 Mar]. The lack of rules, audit and audit trails that can be confirmed and trusted will cost money and have legal consequences.

The next may require subscription to view on Substack

The Architecture of Voice: Why AI Tools Can Mimic Style But Not The Voice

Stuart Miller (Haverin Consulting)’s fourth article on AI’s effect on language and writing. An AI LLM can partly fill two parts of the Competence Framework–Skills and Knowledge–but it does not have Experience. It is incomplete in these three points of Context, and Voice represents the accumulation of Context. FTA: “The dangerous part is the assumption that accelerated Knowledge substitutes for Experience, when in fact accelerated Knowledge, and improved Skills untethered from time, is precisely the recipe for the Builder’s Mirage. The Builder’s Mirage is the illusion of competence, produced without the underlying thing being present.”

Sergei Polevikov’s Substack under AI Health Uncut will require subscription to fully view. His latest are:

Hippocratic AI Fires Its International Sales Team

It’s turning into Theranos 2.0. FTA: “Revenue is an estimated $17–20M ARR. Burn rate is $404M.” Their customers are also their investors. and “Hippocratic AI has quietly withdrawn from all of its international markets, terminated every international contract, and let go of the international sales team that built those relationships.” Contracts were sold without country language versions, adequate GPU infrastructure, and compliance.

Christina Farr: “Where is all of our empathy? Where did it go?”

Christina Farr is the former CNBC healthcare tech reporter, founder of  Second Opinion Media, and is a funder/advisor in the field. The article is derived from his and Alex Koshykov’s interview for their podcast Digital Health Inside Out (48 minutes, go to YouTube, no paywall). “A no-holds-barred conversation about what’s broken in healthcare media, what’s about to break in digital health, and why she’s not coming back to journalism.”

Until next week….

The weekend read: why SPACs came, went, and failed in digital health–the Halle Tecco analysis/memorial service; why OpenAI is going to be a bad, bad business

April 10, 2025 | by

Let us now hold the formal memorial service for the SPAC–the special purpose acquisition company, at least for digital health. Halle Tecco, whom many of us know as the founder and past CEO of Rock Health, plus angel investor, plus adjunct professor in digital health at Columbia, now has an opinion blog on Substack. As our Readers know, this Editor, who is none of the above, has been shoveling dirt on SPACs here on TTA since they became an Easy Way To Avoid the cumbersome, oh-so-tiresome preparation for a public IPO during the Digital Health Boom of 2020-22 (RIP). She has been covering their Trouble Every Day and demise ever since. Having not kept quantitative track of Cracked SPACs, only the news as they floated, declined, and failed, this Editor enjoyed Ms. Tecco’s quantitative analysis of the overall picture. She puts it into a readable business context. 

Shockingly, SPACs across all IPOs are still going on. In 2023 and 2024, total SPACs as a percent of IPOs neared 40%. Their high was reached in 2022 at 73%. The attractiveness of SPACs was obvious: an investor sets up a publicly traded company and goes through the hassle of an IPO. It raises money on public markets and from investors to acquire another company. Then it hunts for a company to acquire. The target is landed, is acquired, symbols change, and the deal is done, all in three to six months. The acquired company doesn’t have to go through the investor pitches, the due diligence, the incessant filing…less fuss and muss, but missing the rigor of a traditional IPO. For the SPACs, especially those focusing on digital health, 2020-22 became FOMO Fever–the fear of missing out.

For digital health companies, the boom became a race to the bottom. 

  • 30.4% went bankrupt, some spectacularly, others with a whimper as they’ve failed, one after the other: 23andMe, Cano Health, Babylon Health, Nuvo, Pear, others
  • 26.1% were acquired well below their SPAC entry price: Sharecare, SOC Telemed, Akili and others. The only exception: Augmedix, with a $40 million SPAC valuation, was bought for $139 million by Commure. (Commure is backed by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz; Commure/Athelas itself is an interesting and complex story.)
  • 39.1% are still in business but trading below their SPAC entry price. A number flirted with the Devil of Demise and are recovering: Clover Health, Owlet (baby monitors), Butterfly (ultrasound POC), Talkspace. DocGo became a Covid play and then got into political trouble and is nearing $2/share from their late 2022 high of just below $11. And others.
  • There is exactly one success story: hims & hers (4.3%)

Enjoy this read on her blog. If you prefer a podcast, here’s Ms. Tecco on her ‘Heart of Healthcare’ with Mohamad Makhzoumi (link is to Spotify), co-CEO of New Enterprise Associates (NEA), a VC in healthcare and technology (33 minutes), discussing healthcare’s evolution, so to speak, from “the trailer park of venture investing” and the hilarious ‘healthcare hokey-pokey’. And here’s a Gimlety View of SPACs from 26 June 2024.

Another Big and Disastrous Fail in the making may be OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. It is converting from a non-profit to a for-profit company, losing its founder group, fundraising like crazy, and generally has ditched its Mission. “OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”  OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time, $6.6 billion, and is now valued at $157 billion. Why overvalued? A tell is that SoftBank has invested $500 million into this megillah–this Editor recalls that SoftBank invested in Theranos and WeWork. Another tell–the NY Times and The Information estimated that Open AI lost $5 billion in 2024, it loses money on every copy of ChatGPT, and its revenue projections are near-absurd at $11.6 billion in 2025 and $100 billion by 2029. It totally ignores that every major player has an AI program, from Microsoft to Google. If you’re a fan of ChatGPT or need your eyes cleared around this type of AI, grab your cuppa and a bottle of your favorite pain reliever for Ed Zitron’s article, OpenAI Is A Bad Business. (Ed is an English tech writer, podcaster, and PR specialist)