Obviously the AI rollout should be slowed down and AI use regulated, like stopping any replacement of workers by AI.
But China is set to win the AI race with their open weight models on par with the current frontier models. And they are building nuclear power and solar and wind like no tomorrow. And they just started to produce sodium ion batteries to solve the grid storage problem.
Spurned by the embargo they are developing more efficient algorithms and “Extreme UV lithography” to catch up to the embargoed chips. The neoliberal model of the west is now falling behind even the high tech sectors.
In case anyone is curious it takes 8 Nvidia B300 cards to run this Kima K3 frontier model yourself (2.8 trillion parameters), costs about half a million. For a big corporation or institutions even in the global south that is relatively cheap and that is the top tier option for running a frontier model. Including complete data sovereignty. Using AMD will be cheaper, and prices will go down once China catches up in like 2030. And you could run that on solar panels and batteries and regenerative water cooling. 8x 1.4kW x24 so maybe 300 kWh LiFePo4 battery so another 50k.
To power one complete AI server you’d need about 134 m² in solar panels which are basically free these days.For solar panels you’d need about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². Plus chargers, and large public pool to cool those 270kW. But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.
So basically less than
10%50% extra costs upfront to make AI data centers sustainable. This is a capitalism problem, both the hype / bubble / psychosis (b2b marketing induced) as well as the sustainability question.Question is, how long are they going to keep making their new models open weight? GPT2 was open too, y’know. Hell, the company that made it is called "Open"AI. Money corrupts.
And how many concurrent users do you get with 8 B300s on the Kimi K3? I’m not 100% sure on the math, but apparently about <= 4 with full context size.
They can make these models open weight because basically nobody’s gonna be able to run them and you can’t just build a brand new model out of it like you can with regular open source software. That 8 nvidia B300 card minimum isn’t enough to run it commercially, it’s good for like a small 10-20 person company of fairly heavy users, or slightly more if not using heavily.
Money corrupts.
You say it as if OpenAI started with good intentions and got corrupted by the money. But the most likely explanation is that it was a scam from the start.
Iirc it was mainly a novelty thing for playing video games. A DOTA2 tournament was one of their big breakthroughs
I couldn’t find anything about concurrency. But I assumed it’s more like ~1000 users? B300 has something like 100,000+ tok/s, not sure about context size. I also was wrong on my math for the solar panels, see above. It’s more like +50% costs than 10%. Obviously all of this is napkin math, but even 50% isn’t too bad. My point is that with a slightly saner rollout of AI there seems to be absolutely no problem to make it sustainable. And if you buy your tokens in China you can select a data center that gets it’s power from nuclear or solar.
And yeah we don’t know how long they will release open weight models. Once hardware to run such open weight models become available they might change tactics. But right now China releasing these open models has a serious impact on the stock price of these AI companies, which is a good thing. The sooner the AI bubble pops the better.
And like 7 of the top 10 suppliers of tokens right now is from China apparently. What Xi himself said is that the world needs a multilateral approach and AI should not become a monopoly. And while that is clearly propaganda aimed at the global south, China does have a different approach. They spend peanuts on their AI models compared to the west (and the algorithmic breakthroughs done by Chinese AI researches afaik have also been published).
But you actually can use an existing model to generate training data for a new model. Which is what the US corporations are currently accusing China of doing, which is of course hilarious. Of course China has generated huge amounts of training data themselves. So basically any industrial country could in the future fund a research effort to produce a new AI model and make it open weights. A monopoly situation would be another huge issue with AI.
Basically in regulation, sustainability and democratizing access China is doing very good. And in poking the AI bubble.
and texas was going to add another 1800 datacenters, until they saw thier elections of the gop is jeopardy.
They will add them after the elections…
it’s very well comprehensible if you’re good with numbers.
“AI is a tool stop being a luddite” mfs when being exposed to this reality
To make AI data centers sustainable with solar and batteries costs about 10% of the price of the base hardware. The AI hype is still insane but we can have a little AI.
Man I want your supplier for batteries and panels tbh.
A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW. Costs about 500k. Assuming you live far enough from the equator to have seasons, you’ll have about 8 hours of daytime at the worst points of the year (less at my latitude for an example, we get ~6 hour days in the dead of winter, with sun angles below 10 degrees and sunshine available… not every week)
Even in a slightly less extreme location, You’d be looking at roughly a 100 kW array to fill the battery and power that one server reliably like when there’s clouds, about 300 kWh battery capacity to get through long nights. Easily 6 figures total cost, maybe 20-40% of the server itself. This assumes no electricity used for cooling, so it’s very much back of the envelope math, reality could be much worse or a tiny bit better depending on your latitude.
A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW.
Huh? 1400 TDP = 1.4 kW. This is official I believe.
And maybe my sources are off but: “As of July 2026, a single B300 GPU purchased outright runs about $53,000 (Spheron Network, July 5, 2026)” https://tech-insider.org/nvidia-blackwell-gpu-pricing/
Uh you’re right, you need about 4x so 270 kWh over the day, which requires about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.
Looking at the actual numbers (less than 1%) other commentors are posting as opposed to clickbait headlines, I’m not seeing the issue.
Note that the negative impact of these facilities are, by designed, concentrated on the communities that get stuck with them. The overall percentage has to be considered in the context of them focusing that impact into relatively small, super dense footprints.
Also, the percentage is higher than 1%, and in the US is about 5%. This reflects the current situation that the AI companies lament is just too constrained on them, with ambitions of getting to 20% if circumstances allow them to build up the way they want. So it’s already somewhat significant, especially with the way it gets concentrated, and further they want to bump it up at least four fold beyond what they’ve managed to do so far.
In anticipation of that, energy strategies that planned to be more tame and grow by renewables got pushed aside in favor of more natural gas, and especially portable power generation which tends to be more polluting.
I’m exhausted of all this. The data centers have been so pervasive that some communities have been thinking about rationing electricity to get around the requirements. That’s… a dystopia future if Ive ever seen one.
The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.
When a data center permit is applied for, it should be weighed against the state of the grid. If there’s not enough production, it should not be allowed unless they also build a bunch of electricity production capacity, which needs to come online first.
There are instances where this could actually be a net benefit for the grid. Right now in my country, power prices go negative at peak sunlight hours in the summer because we have nothing to do with all that electricity. If you produce solar, gotta disconnect from the grid at those points. A reliable consumer working 24/7 would help even things out for the consumption side of the grid math.
Not that I want them in my country, we have a very dirty grid (shale plants, yay) and live far enough north that solar only works for about 7-8 months a year. But somewhere more moderate in terms of solar availability, it would be fine. Here we need more consumption in the summer and less in the winter.
The politicians of those communities have failed their constituents.
Sure, but have they failed their own bank accounts? Need to ask the important questions…
Hyperbole is hyperbole. I refuse to fall for bullshit just because it’s aligned with my views and opinions.
I personally think it’s bullshit that these things are happening to begin with, not that people are ringing the alarm to our new reality. The latter is just us doing our part to fix this.
Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030
The United States emitted 4.9 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2024.
So by 2030 the AI industry CO2 release might be 0.9% of total US emissions.
That ‘almost’ in “Almost Incomprehensible” is doing a lot of work there.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
I love Lemmy math nerds and honestly appreciate how there’s always at least one to put things in perspective for those of us who worked really fucking hard to get a C in college algebra. Cheers.
But…but…but… the RAGE! With a measured approach to topics like that, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FUEL THE RAGE!!!11
.9% from a single source is RIDICULOUS though
Ok how much is beef farming accountable for
A huge amount too, 37.9%
But more than one thing can be bad a time, a novel idea, I know
And how many beef farms are there compared to data centers? A lot of a lot more.
If a tiny amount of physical space can do such a large amount of pollution, that’s a worry, when the plan is to increase the amount of them.
Well, sure, but when everyone loses their fucking minds about the tiniest thing, that even requires us to buy all the lies from billionaires about how much the build out will be, while having never done anything about the biggest thing they could personally change, it starts sounding mightily hypocritical.
It seems like the personal responsibility to boycott polluting and unnecessary industries is limited to whatever doesn’t require any personal effort from the person speaking.
Napkin math:
- 40% of americans are very or extremely concerned about AIs environmental impact
- To save 34 million tonnes of CO2e, you need about 5.2 million vegans from now until 2030
- So only 5% of ONLY the complainers would need to go vegan to make up for this “tremendous” impact
- That’s 2% of all americans
That’s the thing we’re even attacking random strangers online for. The thing that we pretend is going to bring about the end times. But sure, veganism is the extreme position…
By the way, what other resources are we saving?
- Water — about 8.8 trillion gallons (~33 billion m³)
- Land — around 1–1.5 million acres of forest/land
- Animals — roughly 8 billion animals including fish and shellfish
More than one thing can be bad.
Why don’t we do both? Less AI, Less Meat
Also, I’m not American, don’t insult me by assuming I’m one
Or, just eat less meat and you can still have AI
So less food variety and I get trash for the trade, are you the White run merchant buying any random crap the Dragonborn drags in by any chance?
or have double meat and no ai.
Sounds like a bad solution to me
Much more realistic: 6% of amicans that eat mostly vegan
12% of Americans that often choose a vegan meal multiple times per week, seems realistic too.
Personally I’ll never go Vegan simply out of spite because no matter what is being discussed there’s ALWAYS some asshole inserting veganism into the topic.
Veganism might be great for the environment, but as long as you(they) continue to act worse than especially obnoxious Jehovah’s Witnesses, veganism can go fuck itself.
If I devoured one cow every time some vegan asshole spoke up in a thread that was on a completely different topic, cows would be extinct.
What a whiny little bitch you are.
I’m not even vegan. But meat eating morons signal posting that they’re sick of vegans are way more common and annoying than vocal vegans.
Its such a overplayed prejudice for as long as i can remember. I came across overreaching vegans which actually annoyed me maybe five times in my life. Signalposting meat heads are more like a weekly occurance.
Random vegan at a bbq “hey, can i have small sliver of aluminum foil for my stuff and if you guys dont half intentionally wrench the meat juices over my veggies, that would be cool”
What always follows: 10-30 minute moronic rant of some meathead because eating meat is his whole personality.
Consider how rapidly they have been built, and the capitalists’ plans to make many many more. Now also consider the state of the planet’s ecology and the already terrible effects of climate change.
To me, it’s incomprehensible that regular people haven’t already revolted against the death spiral the capitalist class has put us on.
Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?
I present to you…the French.
The French that started by beheading kings and nobles… and shortly after anyone who had a slightly different opinion? The French who shortly after that madness had a new Emperor? THAT French?
Abolitionists are an easy example.
Now if you mean a majority of people, yeah not really. But people in general, it happens.
To me it seems the root of the problem is that humanity depends on fossil fuels for energy.
AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.
Lond tsory short, humanity needs to start getting it’s energy from non CO2 emmiting sources (solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear).
“AI data centers are just one of many things contributing to CO2 emisions.”
A useful perspective is to reverse how we frame the causative logic here; the fossil fuel industry is contributing to the AI data centre madness. There’s a lot of evidence of fossil fuel executives and lobbyists pushing for AI because it helps to justify their existence in a world where renewable energy isn’t just cleaner, it’s cheaper.
What this means is that we have two problems to solve when it comes to CO2 emissions:
- Humanity’s apparent level of dependence on fossil fuels, when accounting for deliberately wasteful endeavours like mega data centres. and
- Humanity’s actual level of dependence on fossil fuels. This is higher than it should be and requires some changes to society to improve, but it’s not nearly as high as it might seem at a glance.
These are both problems we need to solve, but the method is different for esch
Hey but we have a flood of impossible gymnastics moves, fake soldering videos, and even fatter fart videos!
I’ve never seen a data centre with a chimney stack. This must be an American thing.
its the polluting gas turbine power plants that will power these AI DC.
It’s the “temporary” power plants that are stood up to feed the massive power demands. These are usually gas turbines that are not environmentally friendly at all.
One example would be the ai data centers Musk has that he illegally had gas generators installed at. The fine compared to not running them at all is small in comparison to keep them on. This is why it needs to be a percentage or increasing stack of cost not just a small fine every time.
thats why he set them up in rural tennesee, actually most of the datacenters are in red states for those purpose.
Well that’s one way to speed run environmental catastrophe.
Billionaires trying to kill the rest of us faster.
Sometimes I wonder where we could be if all the AI money was spent on e.g. fusion energy research instead.
Who cares about fusion? There was a study in the late 90’s stating that if only 10% of the capital put towards oil research, exploration, extraction, etc, annually, was put towards renewable energies it would catapult the research output by a factor of 30, by year.
We could have, by now, moved completely towards renewables for everyday life needs and start towards producing more energy we could ever need and put that excess towards greater achievements.
We could be exploring the stars instead. NASA’s original plan was land on Luna, survey, then build a shipyard. Instead we just launched a rocket asap and told Ivan to suck it. The centuries long plan NASA had was just…one small step
You solve the problems you have at home before you start making yourself concerned with what your neighbor is doing at theirs.
Space exploration, as it was sold to the general public, was an arms race. The public demonstration of which nation could build faster the engine and carcass capable of delivering a nuclear payload on the other. The money spent on that would have been better spent towards achieving true and long lasting civilizational goal, like disease and poverty erradication, environmental preservation, clean energy and so forth.
It’s the broken window falacy.
I guess we would be 30 years from stable scalable fusion reactions?
I’ve been cynical about them for years but there’s been enough interesting milestones crossed lately that I wonder if an injection of AI money wouldn’t just do the trick.
They don’t want us dead, they want us making money for them
They’d really love it if we could be dead and making money for them. They live in hope!
They still need us to advance AI until it’s able to self-improve. That’s why they’re pumping so much money into scaling. Once they have that, we’ll have lost all leverage - that’s what their evaluations are based on.
I don’t think the current approach can achieve this, but it looks like they’ll do their damndest to try. They’ve already prepared for the worst, and if they can choose between X years before everything goes to shit, or X minus ? years before it goes to shit BUT they get AGI to play with in their bunkers…
Yes, but they also don’t care if the grand majority of us are dead.
They have what they need.
That’s why most have bunkers.
Fuckerbergs is in Hawaii.
They just want us to make money. They don’t give a fuck if you die.
Not really. They are actively trying to circumvent consumers as a step to making money. That is what the entire AI-circlejerk bubble is about.
That’s funny because I would prefer them dead and I bet there are more who think like me than there are who think like them. Maybe they should start getting frightened. I’m not saying we should kill them, but I wouldn’t bat an eye if they just dropped dead. And I bet not much would be lost for humanity after we sat down and made a plan how to redistribute their wealth and equity.
Remember when Elon was all about “transitioning the world to sustainable transportation”? LOL
He was never about that.
He said he was, but actions speak louder and if he ever was he’d be promoting Hydrogen-electric with a Hydrogen ICE transition* instead of battery electric which isn’t sustainable and is environmentally disastrous in its own way.
*Diesel ICE can be converted to Hydrogen ICE (note: they still need ~5-10% diesel, so it’s not a forever technology) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/engineering/research-technology/is/converting-diesel-engines-to-run-on-hydrogen
Give it up. Hydrogen is not happening. Batteries have won. Now we need to move to more sustainable chemistries.
Oh, and yeah, Elon was always just posing.
While I believe that the various pushes for hydrogen in cars and light trucks is a shameless attempt at replacing the revenue stream from petrol, hydrogen does make a lot of sense for heavy trucks, trains, ships - anywhere diesel or bunker fuel is used now.
Or possibly converted into ammonia which is not as hard to transport. But yeah, there might be some residual uses.
Batteries have a much smaller overall environmental footprint than traditional ICE vehicles. Hydrogen is also produced at scale in a super dirty way right now. There is no clean way to produce hydrogen fuel. So, our goal should be less travel overall, public transit, and EVs, in that order.
If we find a way to mass produce hydrogen in a clean way, then I’m all for hydrogen vehicles. But, we aren’t there yet.
Found the Toyota rep
My diesel car has run on B100 (100% biodiesel) just fine for years. That’s already good enough and requires no new technology or infrastructure. Hydrogen is stupid as hell.
Hydrogen can make some degree of sense if we take as an energy reserve, stockpileable, for an event where it is necessary to suplement energy needs.
So many countries with solar farms being turned off to prevent grid collapse could consider building hydrogen plants or, those with sea acess, dessalination stations, to stockpile fresh water underground and extract minerals directly from the water.
They don’t realise that it’s gonna be their own funeral, too. Sure, Elmo and Bebos will most likely die of old age (or drug abuse) in a few decades but many of those cunts are under 30, and they absolutely will have to deal with the apocalyptic consequences of their actions.
And it’s not just them at this point; thousands of politicians and property developers are in it as well. I don’t think most of them are trying to do harm, they’re just blinded by greed.
Too used to money insulating from reality.
maybe they are bitter because they cant live forever and want to take us out. Make as much money out of us as they can, live lavish life and leave everything in ruins after they are done. If we let them, we deserve it. But i dont think we should let them.
Anyone that can should do at least some act of resistance, even if it feels meaningless. Throwing a fucking rock at datacenter physically affects nothing, but symbolically it has value. Imagine 100 people throwin a rock at datacenter, while still likely doenst do anything it would be big message to everyone else. Though it would likely also result in getting into trouble, so everyone should also do some risk evaluation what they can get away with. But simple graffitti could also be effective or even just plain speaking your mind loudly about things.
And most importantly, what the enemy fears most is our unity. So everyone should definitely do everything they can to improve that. Together we stand, separated we die.
But i dont think we should let them.
Honestly, I don’t think we can really stop them. The only people they have to answer to are politicians/government officials and those can be bribed. Sure, we can protest data centres and stuff but even if we’re victorious in stopping one from getting built in place a, there’s always a place b.
I hope humanity hasnt become too docile, walking peacefully into the slaughterhouse.
Peaceful resistance is good if you have infinite amount of time, so we should be prepared to be non-peaceful and actually resist these fuckers. Maybe even forcing their hand and making them tighten the screws on populace to keep control would help with people wanting actual change because they wouldnt be so comfortable with the oppression anymore, i dont know.
but at this point i’m at peace with either option, resist or die. i just would prefer if humanity didnt go out / lose all potential because of few vile beings.
i just would prefer if humanity didnt go out / lose all potential because of few vile beings.
I’d prefer that as well but I feel so defenceless in the matter
They know that things are going to be shit. They just wasn’t the nicest yacht to live on when it does.
I think if they could fully comprehend what was happening right now, they wouldn’t do it.
I don’t think that’s true.
I think they know the future is bleak, and they just want to have the best bio dome or whatever the case may be.
As in, they know they’re making things worse, but if they don’t do it someone else will. So in a bleak and shit future, do you want to live like a king, or choke to death like the rest of us.
It’s a hydra though. If a capitalist leader/billionaire/oil super power abdicates, all available capitalists swarm to fill the vacancy and rake in the power and profits that were given up.
They don’t care the world is ending due to their greed and corruption, they just want to be rich and powerful.
Yes, when people get to a certain level of rich, they generally lack vision and imagination; they don’t need it anymore.
See they think they’re doing Human Instrumentality from NGE
That they will discover true AGI in their lifetime, and then use it to become a living god.
We really have literacy crisis on our hands. Their estimates put the industry (if we pretend it’ll not crash and keep growing) at 34 million tonnes of CO2. What percentage of USAs yearly emissions is that? 0,6% of net emissions.
It’s not the animal AG that’s doing it, not the oil industry, and not the car industry. It’s the 0,6% that MAYBE might happen.
I say this not to ignore those things, but to sensitize your valid impulse to fix global climate change issues to the real culprits. Most importantly, I’d like people to adjust their levels of effort and outrage to the actual impacts instead.
If you cared as much as you pretend you do, you’d already be vegan.
to be fair, the scale of pretty much any global industry is incomprehensible to most people
It’s true, I can not understand how all grocery stores constantly have fruit and vegetables available.
That always blows my mind, still. If you ever grew cherry tomatoes, you know how long it takes and how much it yields. Even the smalltest corner super market has cherry tomatoes, every day of the year. It’s not even a necessity, it’s just there.
Yeah, and most the time they dont taste good
Usable quantum computing will annihilate the need for these data centres. They’ll be defunct within a decade. The earth will be worse off and the money laundering that they provide will move elsewhere. Fuck this timeline.
Sorry to burst your bubble but DC’s aren’t going anywhere. Even if we are in a position to make quantum computers commercially available in the next 10 years they’ll still need to be housed somewhere, powered, cooled and connected.
Besides, quantum computers are great at complex calculations and simulations but you wouldn’t use them to host a website or a VPS. They’ll be hideously expensive so will only be used for the specific workloads that they excel at and everything else will done with the same servers we have now.
AI data centers use complex calculations. Why bring up websites or VPS? these are data centers are no issue, their footprints are small and don’t require much energy to work, unlike the AI data centers.
Neural nets and LLMs are not doing complex math, they’re doing very large amounts of simple math. Quantum computing is probably not going to accelerate our current NN tech.
This is why GPUs are excellent for AI applications, they are built around the goal of doing large amount of pixel shader computations, which is pretty simple math. You could do the math to shade a pixel by hand, for example.
What are you talking about? Qubits are almost perfect for this sort of prediction algorithm.
Fair enough, I didn’t realise they were so different from traditional DC’s.
They shouldn’t be. One of the issue the sheer size and volume, they’re being built based only on speculation not actual need (all the ssd/ram/gpu are sitting in warehouses waiting for these DC to be built — if they’re fabricated at all). They’re also being built where it’s cheap, not where they would be needed (industrial and urban areas) just to save money, externalize costs, and avoid regulations.
They’re not servers. It’s just gpus. It’s not really a data center, basically the same as bitcoin mining.
They’re still servers, the focus is on the GPU side though. A single DGX B300 has 8 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 2 Xeon 6776P CPUs. And networking, RAM, storage. Consumes 14 kilowatts and looks like this
You COULD host a website on one if you wanted to. You’d be stupid to do it, but you could.
Sure, sure… Host them in space, built from privately mined asteroids and powered by fusion!!!
“But but but! If we’re going to solve pollution, we’ll need more of those AI data centres!”
It’s going to be so funny when they build their god AI and ask it to save us and it spits out “should’ve build solar panels 30 years ago”
well, they train their AI with pro fossil propaganda as you see in forums like this. in fact, AI searches forums like this and makes summaries to answer questions you might ask it.
The real Roko’s Basilisk is that it’s disappointed in you and thinks you wasted your life playing with computers.
“The answer to pollution is 42.”
If only we had invested in renewables we could power all the AI we could ever want…
No but we gotta use fossil fuels still you guys! - the top suits
i wish we could focus on making small LLMs better.
some companies are doing this. some definitely aren’tI’m keeping an eye on Hailo for this purpose. I think the future is small embedded AI systems, not massive data centers.
Woth thé Qwen 3.6 3.8 something nice happened most US company LLM got beat by miles. NVIDIA nemotron 27b isn’t as good as qwen two version prior than the one just released. US are beaten on Local LLMs already.
if you start excluding the 1000+ B param models …
using smaller models, would initially ease hardware demand by 60% .
OFC you cant… and probably shouldnt, ignore and disrespect SOTA flagship modelsEven “big” open source models like DSV4 and Ling/Ring are very efficient. They’re big, but (seemingly) sparser than US models, so they’re cheap.
They run surprisingly well with hybrid CPU+GPU inference on desktops. And thats not even getting into the efficient attention mechanisms.
I can run DSV4 Flash, barely quantized, with ~1M context on my Ryzen desktop at ~11 tokens/s. If you told me that two years ago, I would not have believed you.
If AI is so wonderful they could afford to put up solar panels to power the data centers.
I’m gonna throw some numbers around based on a conversation with my friend the other day.
He works at an oil refinery nearby and under heavy load the whole facility can use up to 150MW of electricity. That’s while being rated as one of the least environmentally harmful refineries in the US. They have ~300 acres of solar panels supplying ~35MW over the course of a full day (~50MW during daylight hours). That means 20~25% of their power needs are fully renewable.
He also mentioned that the new Meta datacenter going up nearby is projected to use ~400MW! That’s two and a half oil refineries! That also means that to cover its electricity use they would need to set up ~2800 acres of solar panels. That’s ~11 times the footprint of the datacenter itself and two large farms worth of space on some of the best farmland in the country!
They definitely should be 100% powering the facility with renewables, but even then I don’t think model training justifies the space and resources that need to be invested to accomplish that.
Why are data centers in viable farmland? Put them in the desert
So, requiring them to cover their datacenters with solar farms would lessen power requirements by 9% plus whatever offset to cooling costs, that’s not nothing as we try to find ways to power these things beyond private natural gas plants, which they can’t keep doing.
That should definitely be the barest minimum, it’s just insane to me how much one of these data centers demands. Even beyond the privacy/copyright concerns, it doesn’t seem to me like the benefits of training models faster justifies the costs.
The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US’s largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.
Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.
Its one of those things right?
If AI was so great we should be seeing OpenAI and Anthropic investing in high schools and Universities, “the next generation” so to speak. If AI is “so cool” we should be seeing investment in the next generation to use it. But we are not seeing that, OpenAI got $50 billion from Nvidia and all of that went on Nvidia GPUs, none of it went towards the people who will be using it in 20 years!
You have this thing that a lot of very rich people think is going to be biger than the printing press or the internet and they are not facilitating people to learn it… Their moto seems to be “build it and they will come”.
Think what you want about AI… “It is the best thing since sliced bread” or “it is the Anti Christ”. These companies need 10x even 100x uptake to justify this years spending, Alone. Never mind next financial year. These companies need so much more uptake to be profitable to the point where the level of investment from the MAANG companies makes sence that we should be seeing investment in schools and universitiy programs for these tools to be used so that the next generation and the generation after that, wants to use these tools. Amazon used to run hackathons where they would promote their tools over Microsoft or Google because they knew the developers who use their tech will advocate for their tech. We are not aeeing that level of support for AI tools and, to me, that speaks volumes.
What happens at night?
You’re being sarcastic, right?
Sure if you like
There are a few ways to store excess energy generated during the day. Usually batteries are the obvious answer.
One of the great things about batteries is that the metal used in them is recyclable and can be repurposed to make new batteries. So, at some point, we’ll barely need to be mining the metals used in those.
Compare that to petroleum products which, if not for green energy, would always needs to be extracting more and more to be able to satisfy an increasing demand of energy.
AI will solve this! We just need more data centers!
/s
