The Brain

Absolute, granular vision of every movement.

The Brain is the port’s operating system: one live digital twin of every box, machine, truck, train and ship, one shared data model of their state, and a decision layer that plans, assigns and re-plans the work in real time. It commands the machines we build and corrects the plan the instant reality drifts from it.

Live twin
Common operating picture — every object tracked, identified and scheduled
VESSEL · BERTH 3STS-01STS-02STS-03STS-04STS-05STS-06RTG-01RTG-02RTG-03RTG-04RTG-05RTG-06RTG-07RTG-08TT-003TT-010TT-017TT-024TT-031TT-038TT-045TT-052TT-059GATERAIL · ON-DOCK
SeeEvery machine, box and person located continuously
DecidePlan re-solved every second across quay, yard, gate and rail; a supervisor can hold or veto any step
CommandMoves sent directly to our cranes, carriers and tractors
I · How it works

Edge AI on every machine, one Brain above them all.

Each machine sees for itself and acts for itself, inside limits it cannot exceed. The Brain sees all of them at once, keeps the one true picture, and decides who does what next. Six parts make it work.

01 · Edge

Edge AI and vision on every machine and gate

Cameras, lidar and radar on each crane, carrier, tractor, ship and gate lane feed an onboard AI module. It identifies boxes, reads numbers, spots people and measures sway locally, in milliseconds, with no link needed.

02 · Agents

A swarm of agents

Every crane, truck, container and berth has a software agent: a small program that knows its object’s state, goals and limits, asks for what it needs and reports what it did. About 1.2 million agents for a port the size of San Pedro Bay, most of them containers.

03 · Routing

Everything routed back to The Brain

Agents publish every state change over fibre, private 5G and, at sea, satellite: about 40,000 events a second at peak. Nothing is polled and nothing is typed in, so the picture is never stale.

04 · Twin

A live digital twin of the port

A 3D, time-stamped model of the whole port, updated up to ten times a second for every moving machine. It can be replayed to see what happened, and run forward to test a plan before it is issued.

05 · Data

One shared data model

Every object — box, machine, berth, slot, truck, train, document — is one record with one owner, one schema and one history. Terminal, rail, trucking and ships read and write the same record, so nothing is reconciled after the fact.

06 · Control

Orchestration, with human override

A decision layer plans berths, yard, gates and rail as one problem, assigns each move to a machine and re-solves the plan every second as reality drifts. Supervisors see the same picture; any step can be held, changed or vetoed from the console, and the plan re-solves around that decision.

Architecture — machine to decision and back
Sensing and fine motion stay on the machine. State flows up through the agents into one shared data model and its digital twin; the decision layer plans on that picture and sends each machine its next move. Supervisors watch the same twin and can hold or override any step.
II · Integration

One brain, every machine.

Because we build the equipment, The Brain does not ask a crane what it is doing — it knows. Crane, carrier, tractor, train and ship share one plan, and each executes its piece of it.

III · Central compute

Enough to think about every box at once.

The machines carry their own AI for sensing and motion. The Brain’s central compute holds the twin, runs the agents’ reasoning and re-solves the port’s plan every second, from two sites so that neither a fire nor a fibre cut stops the port.

Central compute
Two sites, one Brain: the port’s central compute
Sites2 mirrored sites on port land, 12 km apart; each can run the whole port alone
Accelerators144 rack-scale AI accelerators (2 × 72), liquid-cooled
AI throughput≈ 8.6 EFLOPS FP4 (8.6 million TOPS); 4.3 EFLOPS per site
CPU12,672 cores on the accelerator hosts (88 per accelerator) + 1,024 cores in the stream and state tier
Memory41 TB HBM (288 GB per accelerator) + 96 TB DRAM in the stream and state tier; 2 PB flash holds 90 days of twin history
Bandwidth≈ 13 TB/s HBM per accelerator, 1.9 PB/s aggregate; 800 Gb/s between racks and sites; dual 100 Gb/s fibre rings to every quay, yard block and gate
Power draw≈ 200 kW IT per site, 400 kW total; ≈ 0.5 MW with cooling — under 3% of the electrical demand of a 40-crane terminal
Process node3 nm-class accelerators with HBM4; the machines’ edge modules are 2 nm-class
RedundancyActive-active. Either site alone runs the port with the plan re-solved every 3 s instead of every second; failover in 30 s; every machine keeps working on its own agent through any outage
Workload1.2 million agents; 40,000 state changes/s at peak; plan re-solved every second across quay, yard, gate and rail; ≈ 500 million agent-model tokens a day; twin replay and forward simulation
The Brain is a mid-sized enterprise AI cluster, not a frontier data centre. The heavy work is inference: agent reasoning, vision review, ETA and dwell prediction and the twin’s forward simulation. The optimisation itself — berth, yard, gate and rail as one problem — runs on the stream and state tier, re-solved every second. Sizing follows the 2026 chip research: about 100 accelerators of today’s class per port complex, doubled for two sites and carried to 2031 silicon. Cost and vendor notes are in BUILD_NOTES.md.
IV · Results

Today’s port, and the port The Brain runs.

Today’s figures are the published San Pedro Bay numbers. The IC figures are design targets for a terminal built from the machines on this site and run by The Brain; each one is derived in BUILD_NOTES.md.

Terminal throughput
25,000 TEU / acre / yr
vs ≈ 5,000 at LA/LB today; ≈ 15,000 at the world’s densest port
Crane moves / hour
120 boxes peak
per STS at peak (all-tandem): 60 lifts of 2 × 40 ft at a 60 s cycle; ≈ 85 sustained; 25–34 today
Truck turn time
20 min
gate-in to gate-out; 55 min today
Container dwell
1.5 days
import yard dwell; 2.95 today. Rail 2.0 vs 6.75
Proof
Throughput per acreToday · ≈ 5,000IC · 25,000 TEU / acre / yrMoves per crane-hourToday · ≈ 30IC · 120 peak · ≈ 85 sustainedTruck turn timeToday · 55 minIC · 20 minImport dwellToday · 2.95 daysIC · 1.5 daysToday: published San Pedro Bay figures. IC: design targets, derived in BUILD_NOTES.md. Bars are scaled per row; lower is better for turn time and dwell.
V · Why we win

Control of the machines is the moat.

Software that watches other people's equipment can only suggest. The Brain commands equipment we designed for it.

I

We see everything

Sensors on every machine and every box position, fused into one digital twin — not a spreadsheet of status updates.

II

We build what it commands

Our cranes, carriers and tractors are designed around The Brain, so a plan becomes motion without translation.

III

We own the whole chain

Ship, terminal, rail and truck under one operator, so the plan optimises the trip, not one link of it.

VI · Where it starts

Brain first, body second.

The Brain exists before any machine is built. It starts as one live service at the busiest port complex in the country and grows, phase by phase, into the system that runs the port. Terminals, trucks, equipment, rail, ships and pipelines are the body that extends its reach.

Phase 0 · live

Empty returns, booked automatically

Automated empty-container return appointments at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Every booking is a live terminal event: the first stream The Brain reads.

Phase 1 · 2027

One true state per container

Terminal, vessel position, carrier, gate and customs records reconciled into one record per box, with canonical identities, duplicates removed and a confidence score on every field.

Phase 2 · 2027–2029

Prediction, then orchestration

Availability, congestion, missed-appointment and rail-cutoff risk, calibrated against what happened. Then recommended moves for the terminal, measured in moves per hour.

Phase 3 · 2029–2030

Agents execute

Supervised first. The proven, safe and reversible actions run on their own. Every machine on this site then takes its orders from the same plan.

The full roadmap →