Yell In a War: the planet is on fire and people can’t afford air conditioning, surely this is the time to come up with a technology nobody asked for and nobody wants then dedicate all the electricity to maintaining it

the planet is on fire and people can’t afford air conditioning, surely this is the time to come up with a technology nobody asked for and nobody wants then dedicate all the electricity to maintaining it

New AI data centers are coming online so fast that the electricity demand is straining global power grids and threatening clean energy goals. Read The Big Take ⬇️

AI Is Wreaking Havoc on Global Power Systemswww.bloomberg.com New artificial intelligence data centers are coming online so fast that the electricity demand is straining global power grids and threatening clean energy goals.

The AI facility in Musk’s new Gigafactory in Texas will house 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. Each one consumes about 3,740 kWh annually. So *just to power the GPUs,* Musk will need 187GWh per year. This is higher annual consumption than some entire countries.

NOTE: I’ve deleted the previous post here, as it included a significant error. Musk himself has estimated 105GWh per year on top of that just to *cool* those GPUs. So 292GWh/yr will be consumed by the GPUs + cooling infrastructure. This is city-sized power consumption.

For easy comparison, this energy would also power all of the time travel in the Back to the Future franchise two dozen times.

Okay, but Musk talks a lot of shit to drive up his share price and attract investors, so I'm not confident he will deliver on this. He also sucks at building Digital products and will probably fail.

That’s quite a deliverable: crashing the country’s electric grid in order to own the libs and provide a “service”nobody wants.

Except he’s building in a separate grid. The weakest grid in the country, but Texas has its own grid.

Part of me wants to say “good, they deserve what he does to them.” This is the poison MAGA spreads even when they fail to convert you (me). I’m sure it’ll use renewable energy sources (Guatemalans walking manual treadmills or some such, probably).

I wish more people understood how terrifying this is. When our grid fails, it isn't the rich who die. It does fail. People do die. We did not ask for any of this. Deregulation is a threat to everyone.

They also turn it off when it gets too cold.

He’s announced plans for even larger compute facilities in other states.

Good thing Texas has such a robust power grid to support this added load.

Yeah. I was wondering what Texans think about this.

We want a new government but *sigh* gerrymandering.

take a guess what the annual power consumption of texas is i'll give you clue, it's a lot more than 300 gwh per annum

Question, if we know where it is, what is stopping us from damaging or defacing it?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm sure they have fire suppression & cooling redundancy but... how's their protection from say rising flood waters

It’s located in a plutocracy that is very protective of its plutocrats. They will jail you for 3000 years or murder you by lethal injection. Yes, they are that vicious, cruel and bloodthirsty.

Didn't stop us before. I see no reason to let Fascism win.

You can log in and ask it questions that make it uncomfortable.

I agree that this is terrible, of course But you should really mention that Tesla's ambitions in this realm pale in comparison to Microsoft and Meta. Each of the following already had 50k H100's purchased as of 2023; Tencent, Oracle, Amazon, Google Tesla is just an also-ran when it comes to "AI"

For some further context, "Meta expects to have 600,000 H100 GPU-equivalent AI horsepower by end of 2024" www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Meta will have 350,000 of Nvidia's fastest AI GPUs by end of year, buying AMD's MI300, toowww.tomshardware.com Meta expects to have 600,000 H100 GPU-equivalent AI horsepower by end of 2024.

This is a great source to cut through all of Musk's nonsense www.youtube.com/@commonsense...

Common Sense Skepticwww.youtube.com The premise behind the Common Sense Skeptic is simple - provide viewers with the ability to break down outrageous claims using simple mathematics, examples, and logic. Wherever possible, and especiall...

It's also worth noting that most of these already run off of renewable power and will continue to do so.

I hope Nvidia survives after AI bubble bursts.

Do these companies have the slightest clue how they will make a profit from all this computing power? I can see how cloud providers will benefit, but the killer apps don't exist yet. It's a huge gamble.

Near as I can tell they're all just onto the "next big thing" and afraid to be late to the party Hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate FOMO

It's a gold rush, but how much gold is there to go around? Zuck just wasted $50bn on VR, so he's no visionary.

Musk is planning more Gigafactories with much higher compute capacity.

Elon Musk's xAI claims it will build the 'world’s most powerful supercomputer' in Memphis, Tennesseewww.datacenterdynamics.com Massive GPU data center dubbed 'Gigafactory of compute'

*at least until he gets interested in something else to waste billions on

Where's IBM fit in there? Or do they use a different processor?

Notice who is definitely not going to be an “also-ran” but is conspicuously absent from this chart. They are not buying any H100s. They figured out how to do it on their own energy-efficient silicon, most of which will be in user devices.

I'm guessing you're referring to Apple ? Apple is spending $5,000,000,000 through this year on AI server compute (mostly H100's)

Are you sure they are H100s? WWDC was all about how they’re putting Apple Silicon in their datacenters. Custom hardware. Their AI will either run on your device, or via something called private cloud compute where the server resources become an extension of your device. Apple can’t see your data.

I looked at a few sources, they all aligned on this (H100's now and probably upgrading to B100's) appleinsider.com/articles/23/...

Apple plans $5B AI server spree, says Ming-Chi Kuoappleinsider.com Apple's attempts to catch up with the rest of the market in the generative AI field could cost more than first thought, with it potentially spending more than $5 billion over two years just on servers...

For comparison, that’s enough power to send a Delorean through time 154.5 times.

This is a metric that I can comprehend.

The movies only ever mentioned gigawatts, not gigawatt-hours. There are two instances in the movies where a time jump occurs mere minutes after refueling, and of course the lightning strike which lasts less than a second, so while it needs lots of current, its power demands are actually negligible.

Thinking further about this, because of course I do: how did Old Biff, starting in and returning to 2015 to give himself the Sports Almanach in 1955, know how to refuel the thing? And how did Doc not notice that the machine had been used, and thus needed refueling, after that trip?

Didn’t the Delorean have Mr Fusion installed by then?

It had, but how would Old Biff know where to put in some waste to fuel it?

Meanwhile Austin Energy is telling me to set my thermostat to 78 degrees 😐

Don't forget 82 at night! (San Antonio CPS Energy)

Omg 🥵

if the texas grid is known for anything, it's a power grid that can handle heavy load.

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