so like 3 racks of h100?
OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
571–580 of 668 posts
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#572Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined , then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal stat…
> So where is this 10GW electric supply going to come from If the US petro-regime wasn't fighting against cheap energy sources this would be a rounding error in the country's solar deployment. China deployed 277GW of solar in 2024 and is accelerating , having deployed 212GW in the first half of 2025. 10 GW could be a pebble in the road, but instead it will be a boulder. Voters should be livid that their power bills a…
I'm living in one of the most expensive electricity markets in the US. It has a lot more to do with the state shutting down cheap petro energy (natural gas) and nuclear then replacing it with... tbd.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would that solar power a DC at night or on a cloudy day? Energy storage isn’t cheap.
In 2025 it’s cheaper to demolish an operating coal plant and replace it with solar and battery, and prices are still dropping.
Why aren't all these businesses doing that then?
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase. This here underscores how important TSMC's upcoming N2 node is. It only increases chip density by ~1.15x (very small relative to previous nodes advancements) but it uses 36% less energy at the same speed as N3 or 18% faster than N3 at the same energy. It's coming at the right time for AI chips used by consumers an…
> N2 is shaping up to be TSMC's most important node since N7 Is it? N2, from an energy & perf improvement seems on par with any generation node update. N2:N3 N3:N5 N5:N7 Power ~30% ~30% ~30% Perf ~15% ~15% ~15% https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-reveals-2nm-fabricati...
Yes. It has more tape outs at this stage of development than both N5 or N3. It’s wildly popular for chip designers it seems.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prices of _everything_ went up over the past five years. Datacenter expansion was far from the main driver. Dollars and cents aren't worth what they used to be.
Elsewhere it was mentioned that DCs pay less for electricity per Wh than residential customers. If that is the case, then it's not just about inflation, but also unfair pricing putting more of the infrastructure costs on residential customers whereas the demand increase is coming from commercial ones.
Industrial electricity consumers pay lower unit rates per kWh, but they also pay for any reactive power that they consume and then return -- residential consumers do not. As in, what industrial consumers actually pay is a unit cost per kVAh, not kWh.
This means loads with pretty abysmal power factors (like induction motors) actually end up costing the business more money than if they ran them at home (assuming the home had a sufficient supply of power).
Further, they get these lower rates in exchange for being deprioritised -- in grid instability (e.g. an ongoing frequency decline because demand outstrips available supply), they will be the first consumers to be disconnected from the grid. Rolling blackouts affecting residential consumers are the last resort.
There are two sides to this coin.
Note that I am in no way siding with this whole AI electricity consumption disaster. I can't wait for this bubble to pop so we can get back to normality. 10GW is a third of the entire daily peak demand of my country (the United Kingdom). It's ridiculous.
Edit: Practical Engineering (YouTube channel) has a pretty decent video on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwkNTwWJP5k
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work in the datacenter space. The power consumption of a data center is the "canonical" way to describe their size. Almost every component in a datacenter is upgradeable—in fact, the compute itself only has a lifespan of ~5 years—but the power requirements are basically locked-in. A 200MW data center will always be a 200MW data center, even though the flops it computes will increase. The fact that we use this unit…
> the power requirements are basically locked-in Why is that? To do with the incoming power feed or something else?
Cooling too. A datacenter that takes 200MW in has to dissipate 200MW of heat to somewhere.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#577Water is a critical resource in dwindling supplies in many water-stressed regions. These data centers have been known to suck up water supplies during active droughts. Is there anyone left at the EPA that gets a say in how we manage water for projects like this?
Some 1400 cubic kilometers of water evaporate every day on our blue planet here. The water isn't deleted, really.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#578That's a lot. I always had this idea in the back of my mind that British Columbia should get in on the AI game and try and get data centers located in BC because we generally have a lot of "excess" hydro generation capacity. There's a new mega dam recently opened that had lots of criticism about it being "unneeded".
That mega dam (Site C) produces 1.1GW of energy.
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#579Framing it in gigawatts is very interesting given the controversy about skyrocketing electric prices for residential and small business users as a result of datacenters over the past three years, primarily driven by AI growth. If, as another commenter notes, this 10GW is how much Chicago and NYC use combined , then we need to have a serious discussion about where this power is going to come from given the dismal stat…
An 8% increase y/o/y is quite substantial, however keep in mind globally we experienced the 2022 fuel shock. In Australia for example we saw energy prices double that year. Although wholesale electricity prices show double-digit average year-on-year swings, their true long-run growth is closer to ~6% per year, slightly above wages at ~4% during the same period. So power has become somewhat less affordable, but still…
So a 6.6x increase in power bill, offset by a 2.5x wage increase has no major impact?
I'm sure none of the other outgoings for a household saw similar increases. /s
Re: OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems
#580This is throwing more cards on the house of cards. Nvidia is “investing” in OpenAI so OpenAI can buy GPUs from NVidia. Textbook “round tripping.” I generally like what’s been happening with AI but man this is gonna crash hard when reality sets in. We’re reaching the scary stage of a bubble where folks are forced to throw more and more cash on the fire to keep it going with no clear path to ever get that cash back. If…
My thought is think of all the really cheap compute that will be available to researchers. Sure, it will crash but at the end of the day there will be a huge glut of gpus that datacenters will be trying to rent out near cost. I (as a uninformed rando) think that there are a lot of research ideas that have not been fully explored because doing a small training run takes 100k. If that drops to 1000, then there is a lot…
With this level of power usage it might be the opposite. Once they can't subsidize the cost it might increase.