First reported by Tom's Hardware, Icelandic strongman Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson—who won the 2019 World's Strongest Man competition and played Gregor "The Mountain" Clegane in Game of Thrones—has completed a 996 lbs "deadlift of data," hoisting thousands of next-generation, 128 terabyte SSDs at the SD24 computing conference. With each drive likely to command north of $10,000 once they come to market, this has to be the most expensive deadlift ever performed.
The stunt was organized by HPC infrastructure company VDURA and hard drive manufacturer Phison, which provided the drives in question. The marketing stunt was meant to call attention to Phison's monster capacity 128TB SSDs, which are targeting the datacenter market. Björnsson specifically performed a "silver dollar" deadlift, where a barbell is hooked to two large crates—originally loaded with silver dollars for weight when the event first appeared at early World's Strongest Man competitions.
