Nero banished Musonius Rufus to Gyaros in 65, on a charge of joining Piso’s conspiracy that he had no part in. Gyaros is an arid rock in the Aegean with close to nothing on it. He went on teaching there that exile and poverty are not evils, while Rome carried on being Rome without him.
You do not have a Nero. You have a strait.
Singapore’s EDB and IMDA opened a call in December for at least 200 megawatts of new data centre capacity, with applications closing on the last day of March, half the power to come from green sources, the efficiency bar set high enough to disqualify most of the field. Land scarcity and capped power allocations are named in the paperwork as the reason operators keep looking across borders.
Across the water, PT PLN Batam signed a single power purchase agreement with PT DayOne for 511 MVA, roughly 450 megawatts, phased through 2026 and 2027, for one campus at Kabil Industrial Tech Park. Firmus is preparing a 360MW site there with up to 170,000 Nvidia GPUs, running from the first quarter of 2027, on contracts it forecasts will return up to US$30 billion in six years.
The whole national allocation is less than half of what one campus across the strait has already contracted.
You can see the far shore from the East Coast on a clear evening. Some of the money in those lights was arranged in a meeting room ten minutes from your office, by people you have met, and none of it will pass through anything you own.
Nothing in that arrangement has taken a dollar out of your accounts, and it still costs you something to read.
Nothing in that arrangement has taken a dollar out of your accounts, and it still costs you something to read.
That cost is the thing worth naming. The Stoics called the goal apatheia, and the self-help shelf translates it as detachment, which gets it backwards: apatheia keeps the judgement and strips off the disturbance riding on top of it.
You are allowed to think the Batam campus is the most interesting piece of infrastructure in the region this decade. You are also allowed to keep your own size while you think it.
The disturbance usually arrives disguised as diligence. It sounds like strategy, it borrows the vocabulary of opportunity, and it will eat a quarter.
So split the thing you are actually carrying into its two parts, because you are asking them as one question and they are not one question.
The first is whether you should be in this. That has an answer, and the answer fits on one page: name the capability you already hold that a 360MW build in Batam or a Johor campus would pay for, name who signs, and name the date the invoice clears.
Logistics into Kabil. Housing for contractors. Catering, security, a lane through customs you already run.
If the honest answer needs a new team and a new skill and a new customer type, you have found a distraction wearing an opportunity’s clothes, and you close the page.
The second is why you are not in this.
One of those questions closes in an afternoon. The other has no answer and will keep charging you rent to ask it.
One of those questions closes in an afternoon. The other has no answer and will keep charging you rent to ask it.1
Musonius held that exile and poverty are not evils and that a philosopher must scorn all such things. Gyaros was every bit as barren as it looked, and he never pretended otherwise. His claim was about what a rock is allowed to do to a man standing on it.
He came back to Rome under Galba in 68, the same man who had gone out.
That part was always the only part up to him.
Footnotes
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Worth noticing that the Singapore rules themselves name the constraint plainly, down to the US$14.53 per watt it costs to build here. The state did the arithmetic and moved on. It is the one party in this story with no feelings about the far shore. ↩