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A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

economist.com

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Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#21

Post by starchild3001 »

My hunch: we’ll see three things happen in parallel

- AI backend providers vertically integrating into energy production (like xAI’s gas plants, or Meta’s local generation experiments),

- renewed interest in genuinely efficient computing paradigms (e.g. reversible/approximate computing, analog accelerators),

- a political battle over whether AI workloads deserve priority access to power vs. EVs, homes, or manufacturing, alongside an increase in energy prices.

You need cheap, reliable power + political/regulatory willingness + cooling. That’s a very short list of geographies. And even then, power buildout timelines (whether nuclear, gas, or grid-scale solar+batteries) move at "utility speed", which is decades, not quarters. That doesn’t match the cadence of GPU product launches.

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#22

Post by eli_gottlieb »

joak wrote: post #8
jedberg wrote: post #2

I 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

Skill issue!

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#23

Post by pbd »

The timing mismatch is crucial - data centers can be built in 12-18 months, but new power generation takes 5-10 years minimum. We're essentially trying to scale AI demand faster than energy infrastructure can physically respond. This creates interesting arbitrage opportunities in power-rich but compute-poor regions.

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#25

Post by boredatoms »

jedberg wrote: post #2

I 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…

There are hydrogen pipelines in texas. There is at least one DC provider using that for power instead of the grid

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#26

Post by protocolture »

lukebechtel wrote: post #14
joak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

how much of that 10 years is the physical limit, and how much is social / cultural / organizational / political overhead?

From memory, when the brits got out of their own way they could build a nuke plant every 6-8 years.

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#27

Post by protocolture »

jeffbee wrote: post #16
joak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> after permitting Load-bearing parenthetical! > Nuclear power plants take something like a decade to build The most-recently completed fission power station on this planet needed 23 years under construction and it is still in testing. A recent American one took 15 years.

When the brits were at it (With insourced nuclear engineering and low regulatory overhead) they could crank them out every 6 - 8 years.

The brits let all that technical capability wither and could not do it again right now.

But if someone was willing its still theoretically possible. Just takes total alignment between government and private.

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#28

Post by jdboyd »

jedberg wrote: post #2

I 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…

In m

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#29

Post by adriand »

blackoil wrote: post #24

Remove restrictions on solar import from China. 62 GW may sound a large number, but China added 277GW solar in just 2024. They have the surplus capacity and hence cheapest price.

China installed 3 gigawatts of solar power every day in May: equivalent to building one coal-fired power plant every 8 hours. They are so far ahead of the US on renewables now that even if Trump had not sold out the future of the country to the fossil fuel industry, the US would have been hard-pressed to catch up.

Re: A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

#30

Post by estimator7292 »

wmf wrote: post #13
niemandhier wrote: post #4

Energy 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_B T ln(2). This could lead us down a path towards reversible computing, to avoid energy costs for deleting information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s…

The work started around 10-15 years ago and is now largely done. Many people confuse large absolute numbers like 1 kW with inefficiency but today's GPUs/TPUs are close to the practical efficiency limit with today's 3 nm technology.

I think it's mostly because laypeople think that all heat is wasted heat. Most people are pretty surprised to learn that there's a fundamental energy cost to flip a bit and that there even is a lower limit to the amount of heat generated by a bit flip.
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