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The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

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Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#131

Post by kibwen »

lm28469 wrote: post #118
Fiveplus wrote: post #30

The funniest part is beyond the typo, the complete lack of physical intuition from the analysts who circulated this. 500,000 tons is roughly the weight of 1.5 Empire State buildings. If your rack busbars weigh more than the structural steel of the facility housing them, you have a geotechnical engineering crisis on your hands. It is wild that we reached a point where financial modeling is so decoupled from physical r…

When I asked gemini it got it right away and as a source it provided a link to your comment... what a time to be alive, I hope you got the Empire State buildings calculations right because you're now part of the Truth ™ https://imgur.com/a/NaTfvtS

The irony is that I feel like everyone here is just copping off of WolframAlpha, which for the past 15 years has featured the ability to display references of similar magnitude for any query you give. And in fact, typing in "500,000 tons" into WolframAlpha tells you specifically that this is 1.4x the mass of the Empire State Building (and also 0.8x to 1.4x the mass of an Ultra Large Crude Carrier oil supertanker, and also 0.11x the mass converted to energy by the sun in one second).

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=500%2C000+tons

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#132

Post by quickthrowman »

quesera wrote: post #103
margalabargala wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Household electrical usage has decreased, not increased, since that time. Your scaling is backwards. Old aluminum wires in your walls were designed for a time when you lit your home with 100 watt incandescent lamps rather than 12 watt LEDs.

Only true for lighting circuits though, and most household circuits are mixed. The quantity and (edit: aggregate ) power draw of modern appliances is far greater now than 60 years ago, so the overall load on the old wires is much higher.

This is absolutely not true in areas where heating the air and water and cooking are done with natural gas. Every single appliance in a house is more efficient today than in 1970 due to advances in motor speed control, without exception. The only thing that didn’t get more efficient is electric resistive heat and it’s impossible to improve on that anyways.

I can’t think of a single appliance from 1970 that consumes less energy than its modern equivalent. Anything with a pump or fan is more efficient and so is lighting. LCD TVs use less energy than CRTs.

I also can’t think of an appliance that has become common in households that draws more than 100 watts of continuous load since the 1970 aside from just ‘computers’. An ancient 500W 80% efficiency PSU at max load only has 5.2A of current at 120V single-phase.

If you convert your natural gas furnace to a heat pump, you will use more electricity but excluding that and NG to electric HPWHs leaves only more efficient equipment.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#133

Post by quesera »

quickthrowman wrote: post #132
quesera wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only true for lighting circuits though, and most household circuits are mixed. The quantity and (edit: aggregate ) power draw of modern appliances is far greater now than 60 years ago, so the overall load on the old wires is much higher.

This is absolutely not true in areas where heating the air and water and cooking are done with natural gas. Every single appliance in a house is more efficient today than in 1970 due to advances in motor speed control, without exception. The only thing that didn’t get more efficient is electric resistive heat and it’s impossible to improve on that anyways. I can’t think of a single appliance from 1970 that consumes l…

Sure, but there are more appliances plugged in today than there were. The simplest evidence for this is that there are never enough outlets in an old (unrenovated) home.

In a renovated house, you won't have aluminum wire at all, so these concerns are null.

My original statement should be qualified. Since we were talking about aluminum wire it's relevant -- an updated house will have new (copper) circuits that can handle all this stuff. An NON updated house might have Al wire and be overloaded in a more severe way than it was in the 60s.

But FWIW, new >100W appliances:

  - microwaves (1200+W)
  - air fryers (1500W)
  - electric pressure cookers
  - rice cookers (mine claims 610W on the plate)
  - stand mixers (old: 80W, new: 475W)
  - desktop computers (esp gaming rigs)
  - resistive space heaters (1500W)
  - *bigger* TVs (compare 72" LCD to 19" CRT?)
  - air purifiers (mine clocks 175W on high)
  - towel warmers? :)
  - and the ubiquity of 10-20W small stuff has of course exploded, and it all adds up

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#134

Post by literalAardvark »

ironbound wrote: post #88
literalAardvark wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't do math? ChatGPT 5.2 has recently been churning through unsolved Erdös problems. I think right now one is partially validated by a pro and the other one I know of is "ai-solved" but not verified. As in: we're the ones who can't quite keep up. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07421 And the only reason they can't count Rs is that we don't show them Rs due to a performance optimization.

You can feed it the Hodge Conjecture for all I care, the current algorithms are a joke and without real breakthroughs your just generating left to right text with billions in hardware.

Guess frontier math and programming are just left to right text then.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#135

Post by jasomill »

Ekaros wrote: post #97
Pinus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!

How hard would it be to fix this? Could we theoretically add or subtract enough material or make whole thing slightly more dense or less dense to compensate?

Per Wikipedia, the discrepancy is approximately 74 km, so digging a ditch with an average depth of approximately 74/2π ≅ 12 km around the circumference of the Earth would theoretically fix the problem.

Feasibility and geological implications are left as exercises for the reader.

Regardless, I suspect a more cost-effective fix would be to redefine the meter to be a couple "legacy" millimeters longer.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#136

Post by jasomill »

crote wrote: post #28
Pinus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We _have_ standardized on Earth circumferences for length, only we divide by 40 million to make the numbers more sane, and got the measurement slightly wrong!

We should just redefine it to make the speed of light a nice even 300.000 km/s - we are so close already!

Why stop there when we could just as easily redefine it to be 1 (new base unit of length)/second or 1 meter/(new base unit of time)?

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#137

Post by jasomill »

blitzar wrote: post #7
eterm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only there were some kind of international system of standard units.

Olympic swimming pools for liquids, times around the the earth for length and number of double decker busses for height.

Don't forget packs of cigarettes as a more convenient unit for measuring volumes significantly smaller than Olympic-sized pools.

There is, of course, no more need to standardize on a specific brand or style of cigarette than on a specific depth of Olympic-sized pool.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#138

Post by blitzar »

brookst wrote: post #18
blitzar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Olympic swimming pools for liquids, times around the the earth for length and number of double decker busses for height.

Don’t forget cheetahs for velocity and elephants for weight.

A horse as a measure of power and a crocodile bite as a measure of compression strength

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#139

Post by jasomill »

9dev wrote: post #14
nine_k wrote: post #10

> If the "half a million tons" figure were accurate, a single 1 GW data center would consume 1.7% of the world's annual copper supply. If we built 30 GW of capacity—a reasonable projection for the AI build-out—that sector alone would theoretically absorb almost half of all the copper mined on Earth. Quickly doing such "back of an envelope" calculations, and calling out things that seem outlandish, could be a useful f…

Using your brain is so vastly more energy efficient, we might just only need half of that 30 GW capacity if fewer people had these leftpad-style knee-jerk reactions.

While I don't know how more or less efficient it is, WolframAlpha works well for these sorts of approximations, and shows its work more clearly than the AI chatbots I've used.

Re: The 500k-ton typo: Why data center copper math doesn't add up

#140

Post by 9dev »

pixl97 wrote: post #82
9dev wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does that number come from? Does it factor in the energy required to build the servers used to train the model? Does it factor in… the training?

There is no end to this energy comparison... For example does it factor in the 18-24 years needed to train a human and the energy used for that?

No, but humans existing is the one, fundamental constant of our existence. AI, and its usage for the most minuscule of tasks, is a choice.
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