A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
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A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
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Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#2I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all.
They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs.
The big question is were to build them. There are only a few places with cheap and plentiful power. One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big and there is a lot of regulation). Another is Texas (except their grid isn't very stable). And the last is China. And you can't build a datacenter in China unless you're Chinese.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones.
Edit: I wrote this comment four days ago. I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly getting a bunch of replies to it. Apparently when HN does a second chance, they just reset the time on all the comments. Odd, but I guess it makes sense knowing what I know about how the sorting is calculated. It's probably the easiest way.
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#3I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all. They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs. The big question is were to build them. There…
Making it easier to build nuclear power stations would be extremely useful. Let's hope nothing of value is lost in that process.
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#4Energy efficient computing is a very exciting field. I hope it will get more attention driven by these economic constraints.
As a short teaser: Landauers principle suggests that the energy required to erase one bit off information is bounded from below by k_BTln(2). This could lead us down a path towards reversible computing, to avoid energy costs for deleting information.
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#5I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all. They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs. The big question is were to build them. There…
Places further north are great contenders because of the free cooling. Also, many of them have cheap electricity from hydro or even geothermal, like Iceland.
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#6Why Nvidia is desperate to get back to China:
https://youtu.be/DMVAqABLkxk?si=FsyHMGmGEVPUGAot
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#7I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all. They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs. The big question is were to build them. There…
I bet on natural gas powerplants will start being built together with data centers.
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#8I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all. They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs. The big question is were to build them. There…
Nuclear power plants take something like a decade to build (after permitting)
It makes more sense to go for PV plus batteries that can be installed in a matter of weeks
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#9What is the point of all this? Why are we using so much power for hallucinated google search?
Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
#10What is the point of all this? Why are we using so much power for hallucinated google search?
Because, for the time being, people are buying it.