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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

#21

Post by literalAardvark »

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.

You jest, but times around the Earth is the actual origin of the Meter. Kinda.

The history is quite interesting and well worth checking out.

I can't recommend a book on the subject, but I do heartily recommend "Longitude", which is about the challenges of inventing the first maritime chronometers for the purpose of accurately measuring longitude.

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

#22

Post by wongarsu »

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.

Each person uses about 100W (2000kcal/24h=96W). Running all of humanity takes about 775GW.

Sure, using or not using your brain is a negligible energy difference, so if you aren't using it you really should, for energy efficiency's sake. But I don't think the claim that our brains are more energy efficient is obviously true on its own. The issue is more about induced demand from having all this external "thinking" capacity on your fingertips

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

#23

Post by speedgoose »

RobotToaster wrote: post #17
gordonhart wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern reasoning models are actually pretty good at arithmetic and almost certainly would have caught this error if asked. Source: we benchmark this sort of stuff at my company and for the past year or so frontier models with a modest reasoning budget typically succeed at arithmetic problems (except for multiplication/division problems with many decimal places, which this isn't).

Interesting, how have you found they have been performing at more complex things like calculus and analysis?

It’s on the front page of HN once in a while.

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

#25

Post by program_whiz »

wongarsu wrote: post #22
9dev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Each person uses about 100W (2000kcal/24h=96W). Running all of humanity takes about 775GW. Sure, using or not using your brain is a negligible energy difference, so if you aren't using it you really should, for energy efficiency's sake. But I don't think the claim that our brains are more energy efficient is obviously true on its own. The issue is more about induced demand from having all this external "thinking" cap…

Is there an AI system with functionality at or equal to a human brain that operates on less than 100W? Its currently the most efficient model we have. You compare all of humanity's energy expenditure, but to make the comparison, you need to consider the cost of replicating all that compute with AI (assuming we had an AGI at human level in all regards, or a set of AIs that when operated together could replace all human intelligence).

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

#26

Post by kergonath »

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…

It’s one of the useful functions of an engineer.

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

#27

Post by crote »

With regards to the copper market: it keeps surprising me that some people seem to assume copper is a hard requirement for conducting electricity.

In reality copper is just convenient. We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else!

For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, which at current prices is $0.17 / meter. A 2.4mm2 aluminum conductor has the same resistance, weighs 0.0065kg/m, which at current prices is $0.0195 / meter!

Sure, aluminum is a pain to work with, but with a price premium like that there's a massive incentive to find a way to make it work.

Copper can't get too expensive simply due to power demands because people will just switch to aluminum. The power grid itself had been using it for decades, after all - some internal datacenter busbars should be doable as well.

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

#28

Post by crote »

Pinus wrote: post #8
testplzignore wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to standardize on using Earth circumferences as the unit of length. Or better, football fields! (the type of football of course being implied by the website's ccTLD)

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!

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

#29

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

ironbound wrote: post #4
tlb wrote: post #3

Checking the arithmetic in every paper published seems like an good use case for LLMs. Has someone built a better version than uploading a PDF to ChatGPT and asking it to check the arithmetic?

LLM's are why we're in this mess, they can't do math or count r's

Yes, yes. We’ve all seen the same screenshots. Very funny.

Those of us who don’t base our technical understandings on memes are well aware of the tooling at the disposal of all modern reasoning models gives them the capability to do such things.

Please don’t bring the culture war here.

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

#30

Post by Fiveplus »

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 reality that nobody paused to ask if the floor would collapse.
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