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.
Splurge for me, conserve for thee.
Same with water in CA. Industry uses >80% of water in the state and the focus is on 30 second showers and bullying citizens because their representatives have been captured along with their press in the profit machine.
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/
But it’s not the AI farm’s fault, because they get paid to turn off during times the grid is under a lot of stress. So they make money 100% of the time, don’t worry!
“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.
Some of these facilities do generate a significant portion of their own electricity via various means. It’s not like that amount of energy is just sitting out there on the grid waiting to be used. Somebody has to generate it and if you’re already investing millions in rectifiers, batteries, and other data center power systems, why wouldn’t you consider taking it a step further?
AI Data centers noticeably fuck with the grid. As a result they are facing internal and external pressure to generate more of their own power. Microsoft is opening a nuclear power plant. I would not be shocked to learn through solar, wind, and coal they provide the majority of their own power
But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.
The “depending on how you count” probably refers to the renewables.
My data center has 35MW of generators onsite. No modern DC is designed nor built without backup generators to allow continuous operation during any utility power outages.
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.
I guess they could say they are generating 1GW of computing power
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.
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.
Every time you thank ChatGPT, a house goes dark in Wyoming
*a barn goes dark
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But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources
Very unfortunate, as this could have been an opportunity to advance the green power agenda. Solar, wind, and nuclear are all more efficient than fossil fuels – so why build new fossil fuel plants?
Fake news! Everyone knows Wyoming was made up by the deep state and doesn’t actually exist.
Wyoming is corrupt as fuck. Coal is in charge there
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.
Literally the plot of Eddington lol, this country gets worse each year
I was looking for someone to say this. Then realized not many people here watch recent movies.
More like most people don’t watch anything other then studio tentpole and popcorn muncher movies
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
Lots of wind farms out there
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”
