Wyoming town to host AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined
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Remember how we were told to switch to led lights and efficient appliances to conserve power? Guess it was just to save it for data centers.
Yes, and my bill become 1/5 of what it was, so maybe is was a not so stupid thing to do.
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And suddenly these same assholes will tell you to turn your ac off because the power grid can't meet demand for some "mysterious" reason.
Reminds me of the story of Texas paying bitcoin farms millions of dollars not to use energy during heat waves https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-riot-texas-power-grid/
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Yeah that language is pure corporate BS - data centers CONSUME energy at massive scales (up to 1 gigawatt in this case, which is insane), they're literally just giant heaters that occasionally produce AI outputs as a byproduct of all that wasted electricty.
1 gigawatt is not that insane, and I doubt it's what the datacenter consumes. A rack can easily get into double, even triple digits kW for GPU heavy setups. So let's say 10 racks per Megawatt. I'm sure such a datacenter has more than 10.000 racks. Plus A/C, and all other "ancillary" uses. A normal datacenter can get close to 1 GW, this thing might be double digits, but I doubt they will publish exact numbers.
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More like a GW of heat... Thankfully I'm sure that will counteract whatever has caused it to be over 80 degrees on my way to work before 0700.
Every square kilometer of land (0.38 Sq miles in freedom units) gets about a GW of heat from the sun (depending on latitude). I doubt one datacenter will contribute that much...
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Every square kilometer of land (0.38 Sq miles in freedom units) gets about a GW of heat from the sun (depending on latitude). I doubt one datacenter will contribute that much...
I don't know, I've been in some hot places but massive cooling towers tend to radiate a bit more (now I know what I'm reading about today) and a data center without the ability to pump heat outside isn't going to make it a whole day before it's toast.
Not necessarily disagreeing, just curious about how much heat is dispersed by the ones here.
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“To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest data center — we think of it as a campus — in the world,” OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane told The Associated Press last week. “It generates, roughly and depending how you count, about a gigawatt of energy.”
Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy? It does literally the exact opposite. I guess you don't need to actually know anything to get a leadership role at openai, as long as you can say lots of words.
Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy?
It's less absurd than it sounds and requires understanding how modern data center facilities that are being deployed by big tech actually work and run at a facility-wide and systemic level. They do generate this energy, they just proceed to use it. Notice he says roughly a gigawatt of energy, which is nowhere near the gross need for the facility as per the article.
Most modern data centers built in the past few years, especially those that are "campuses" as described, have on-site power generation solutions. Sometimes this means classic oil/coal/gas generators on the property, sometimes it means more involved and nuanced situations. What Lehane is telling the AP here is that, of the energy consumed by the new data center as a whole, "roughly and depending how you count," 1 gigawatt comes from such sources. The article clearly states the center is set to deploy at 1.8 gigawatts consumption scaling up to 10 gigawatts over the lifespan of the facility. Presumably these are on the same time scales and everything. Frankly, for an AP article this was written quite poorly and the exact meaning of most this information isn't very clear. I don't think that's Lehane's fault implicitly. Just seems like bad reporting.
People have this image in their heads of these big data centers opening up and just like, sucking up all the power from the local grid due to their demand and this is what causes things such as blackouts. This is mildly incorrect. The negative effects of these data centers' power demands is less to do with them "overloading" public grids and more to do with the market economy of energy. You get blackouts because all the energy they can't generate themselves on-site must be acquired somewhere else. They can walk up to the local power companies and buy energy just like any private citizen can. They often get discounted rates compared to the plebes, too. You end up with blackouts because the energy companies don't give a shit who they sell their product to, they just care that it sells. When companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, or OpenAI roll up with significantly more capital and resources than anyone else in the local economy, they're easily able to out-compete even the entirety of the local domestic power demand. That's what causes blackouts.
No one wants to talk about this because it's easier to just say braindead shit like "fuck datacenters/AI/big-tech/fuckingwhateveritis" so you can feel like you're "on the right side" than it is to acknowledge the long line of people in both the public and private sectors who had to rubber-stamp personally fucking the average person for us to even get to this point. Does big tech suck absolutely, fat, stinking donkey balls? For fucking sure. Are they anything more than a symptom of a much more entrenched societal rot? Nope.
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Can imagine, but hey, someone's gotta pay for all those Sora videos I'm generating and trashing because the subject had too many extremities.
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Because solar and wind plants, while they can be cheap and relatively fast to build, are not as reliable as a datacenter need and it is not predictable, so at most they can supplement some other generation method, in this scenario. Then ok, you probably need less fossil fuel (but gas is not necessary fossil these days).
And a nuclear plant is probably way longer to build than the datacenter itself, if you ever get the green light to build it.keepin my fingers crossed for nuclear.
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Will AI finally be the push we needed to seriously invest in Nuclear 100%?
I'd rather that than solar panel companies create a bunch of garbage to say that they're "saving le planet" -
Can imagine, but hey, someone's gotta pay for all those Sora videos I'm generating and trashing because the subject had too many extremities.
Me with suno songs lmao
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Because solar and wind plants, while they can be cheap and relatively fast to build, are not as reliable as a datacenter need and it is not predictable, so at most they can supplement some other generation method, in this scenario. Then ok, you probably need less fossil fuel (but gas is not necessary fossil these days).
And a nuclear plant is probably way longer to build than the datacenter itself, if you ever get the green light to build it.Batteries exist.
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Reminds me of that town that Musk basically bought a while back, promising a spaceport or something, and all they really got out of it is a lot of noise and pollution.
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The state exports almost three-fifths of the electricity it produces, according to the EIA.
this means to use internal "surplus" electricity in the state, 750mw data center would be supported. The initial build is 1.8gw. Need to increase electricity production in the state by over 150%. Surrounding states that depend on Wyoming imports get screwed if WY production not increased more.
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