@SamAugustDean
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Formerly @latimes, now writing a book on defense tech and editing @buffetmagazine
United States
Joined October 2009
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Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
PepsiCo is running out of carrots. At about 790 million gallons of Gatorade a year, coloring fruit punch alone would take around 90,000 tons of black carrots, a crop the US mostly imports from India and Turkey.
Gatorade will pull artificial color from three flavors this fall: fruit punch, lemon lime, and orange. Fruit punch switches to color from black carrot and purple sweet potato. Lemon lime to beta-carotene, the orange pigment in carrots and dark leafy greens.
But to match the same shade, a plant-based color takes up to 10x the volume of a synthetic dye like Red 40. For fruit punch, about two black carrots per bottle. Once the whole US food industry switches, demand for natural colors rises 400 to 500%.
Orange was supposed to get natural beta-carotene, but will use synthetic beta-carotene for now. PepsiCo told the FT: "We just couldn't get enough to do the orange."
The Danish company Oterra sells about 1,200 natural colors, black carrot color among them. Black carrot color already exists and the FDA permits it.
PepsiCo, Conagra and Smucker have said they'll drop artificial dyes by the end of 2027. All three will buy natural color from many of the same crops, at the same time. Natural colorant prices are modeled to rise anywhere from 53% to over 1,000%, depending on how fast the industry moves.
The solution is precision fermentation. Put the genes for the plant's pigment-making enzymes into a microbe, feed it sugar, and let the microbe make the pigment. It already works for other colors. Impossible Burger's red comes from a soy gene put into yeast, and the FDA has allowed it since 2019.
Anthocyanin, the red in black carrots, is harder. A beet red needs about three plant genes in the yeast. Anthocyanin needs about ten, and the yeast breaks down some of the pigment it makes. So far this only works in the lab, and in tiny amounts.
Oterra is working toward FDA approval for a fermented replacement for Red 40, with a commercial product targeted in about three years.
The future of Gatorade depends on fermentation.
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
The average voter seems as hostile to alfalfa farming in the desert as data center construction
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Much of the history of Silicon Valley remains to be written.
I've just released a new tool to make it easier to discover material on the history of the Valley. Start here. silicon-valley-archives.gith…
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Japanese Americans grew most of the state’s celery once in Venice Beach. I found some still growing wild in Ballona Creek this past weekend and wrote about it in Lunch Box. frankbear.substack.com/p/jap…
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
NEW ODD LOTS:
Hollywood was falling apart even before AI, now it's getting worse
@tracyalloway and I had great time chatting with, TV writer, podcaster, former LA City hall guy @hayesdavenport about what the industry's trouble mean for the city overall podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Slated to start October 13. Seems fair to guess the White House might be planning to launch immigration raid showdowns in the two biggest cities and media hubs three weeks before the midterms.
NEWS: DOJ is recruiting military lawyers for October prosecutor posts supporting immigration related law enforcement surges in Manhattan, LA, & Sacramento, per Pentagon email reviewed by @BLaw. I’m told this is unheard of for SDNY.
news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law…
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
NEWS: DOJ is recruiting military lawyers for October prosecutor posts supporting immigration related law enforcement surges in Manhattan, LA, & Sacramento, per Pentagon email reviewed by @BLaw. I’m told this is unheard of for SDNY.
news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law…
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Hot news:
If you're a qualified purchaser, you can actually buy yourself a Bullfrog, RIGHT NOW, from cuas.mil
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
It only took 5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water (over a quarter of total consumption in the basin) for alfalfa farmers to lose $2.86 billion last year. Great system.
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
anthropic is asking shareholders to approve a new corporate structure that would award its seven co-founders majority voting power, an arrangement kinda like $PLTR’s founder-control structure.
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
This is a huge NYT investigation into how Russia uses shell companies and Tether, a crypto coin, to evade sanctions and buy arms.
What it doesn't mention is that the main U.S. backer of Tether is Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Howard Lutnick's sons. nytimes.com/2026/09/24/busin…
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
I learned this week that I have been promoted to chief correspondent at Business Insider.
I’m grateful to my editors, who always make my work better, and to my sources, who answer my frantic calls and texts at all hours of the day and night.
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Article Twitter is back! A whole week of ppl talking about articles! LETS GO I MIGHT STILL HAVE A JOB IN 2 YEARS
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Amazon is building hundreds of data centers across the US. Our team reviewed hundreds of documents to understand how it plans to power them.
Today, Cleanview is releasing a report on what we found. Here are a few takeaways:
1/ Amazon has nearly doubled its footprint in just a few years.
When ChatGPT launched and ushered in the generative AI era, Amazon operated 7.4 GW of data center capacity in the US. Since then, the company has nearly doubled its footprint.
No other company comes close to Amazon’s lead as the largest data center operator. Amazon has 69% more capacity than the next hyperscaler, Microsoft, and roughly double Google and Meta’s capacity.
The speed and scale of this buildout is visible from space.
In the satellite images below, you can see Amazon’s New Carlisle campus in March 2024 and March 2026. In just two years, the company built the world’s largest data center—a 1 GW campus dedicated to its customer, Anthropic.
2/ Amazon’s old power playbook broke.
Up until 2022, Amazon built nearly all of its US data center capacity in three states: Virginia, Oregon, and Ohio.
Amazon’s playbook to power those data centers was relatively simple: Find a grid with "headroom", sign a C&I power contract, and match electricity consumption with renewable PPAs.
That playbook broke over the last few years. In each of Amazon's primary markets, utilities that served AWS for more than a decade simply ran out of power.
3/ Amazon is buying every kind of power it can get. The company has contracted:
- 25.6 GW of carbon-free electricity
- 17.9 GW of solar
- 4.4 GW of wind
- 3.1 GW of nuclear
Amazon’s sustainability reports mention these deals often. But the company also has a large and growing gas power fleet it doesn’t talk about much publicly.
Utilities and independent power producers are building 17.5 GW of new gas generation to serve Amazon’s growing power needs.
That shadow gas fleet will be the subject of tomorrow's Cleanview newsletter and a LinkedIn post here.
In the meantime, you can purchase the full report, download a free preview, or learn more about our research subscriptions by visiting Cleanview's website.
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Congrats to @PalmerLuckey and Anduril for winning the Wildfire XPRIZE - for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition!
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
Armada is partnering with @traysartech to bring sovereign AI infrastructure underground. This will position and protect critical compute beneath the surface; using the Earth’s crust as armor for the missions that can't afford downtime. Truly distributing intelligence to new parts of the world.
traysar.com/news/traysar-lau…
Sam Dean 🦅 retweeted
NEW @semafor: Paramount executives have discussed an equity injection from @elonmusk, as the company looks to diversify its cap table and shore up its financial picture. $PSKY $WBD
semafor.com/article/09/23/20…
