Hypervisible: “Ability to find power right now will determine the winners and losers in the AI arms race. It has left us with a map bleeding with places where the retirement of fossil plants are being delayed.”

“Ability to find power right now will determine the winners and losers in the AI arms race. It has left us with a map bleeding with places where the retirement of fossil plants are being delayed.”

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution.www.washingtonpost.com Some data centers need as much energy as a small city, turning companies that promised a clean energy future into some of the most insatiable guzzlers of power

This is a very good piece, and I think lots of people should read it! Buuuut let's just put this out there as plainly as we can: if you are resorting to trying to make *fusion!!* happen to power your newest products, you are absolutely going to fail and should admit as much.

Fusion, as a technological concept wrt our energy consumption, is something that we understand pretty damn well. We know the contexts in which it can and likely eventually *will* be used to power humanity, but we also know enough about it to say very confidently that it's still a century-plus away.

The fact that OpenAI is negotiating with fusion company Helion, another Altman investment, for nonexistent power should be raising red flags.

Yeah, I was just reading about this a few days ago. Altman in particular is playing with fire. I'm not sure how keen on all this regulators are going to be once they start reviewing all of these sham startups he's gotten himself and OpenAI mixed up with.

guessing they count on deregulation being just around corner🫠

Hear me out: but have they considered that maybe they stop trying to make “fetch” happen? Like what if?

they will just start on 'Futch', it's the constant speculations and transactions from one gadget to another that makes them (a few) money. meanwhile ressources are destroyed and kept out of the hands of the people.

The solution is simple.

I wonder if the bigger constraint is power or water. Either way, both are necessary for human life on a warming planet. "keeping the rows of powerful computers inside the data center from overheating will require up to 1.25 million gallons of water each day"

Do water-intensive data centers need to be built in the desert?www.nbcnews.com As cash-strapped cities welcome Big Tech to build hundreds of million-dollar data centers in their backyards, critics question the environmental cost.

How about that carbon tax, eh?

I'm paywalled, hope they mention how crypto mining has been doing this for a while arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoinarstechnica.com Power plant was left for dead until the cryptocurrency boom came along.

Yeah, funny how a ~decade ago it was cagey crypto operators building minimally-finished out tempermanent installations (with the occasional fire) - oft in violence of local regs because residents and local industry being squeezed for electrical power.

D.R.E.A.M. is moving the centers of data back to the ever expanding data center vertical vs. the edge. Why not inference it…? *Data Rules Everything Around Me. ;)

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