Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

techradar.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 73 posts

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#61

Post by galdosdi »

prepend wrote: post #25

This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries. Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

Any other millennials remember the pre-ajax CGI and based web game based on the book where you made your own countries and alliances and chose tax policy and stuff?

Come to think of it 2003 was only a couple years before Gmail would change web apps forever

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#62

Post by eesmith »

spyspy wrote: post #36

The article doesn’t break out Google/MS proper from their cloud offerings, so it’s not really fair to say they’re using more power like the folks at these companies are choosing to do this. They rent compute and their customers are using a lot more of it. If google just said “we’re not renting out GPUs to save the environment” people would just shift to a competitor.

The calculation is a bit more complex than that.

Google and Microsoft gain from the economy of scale. With many more companies, the overall costs would be higher, and no doubt some people would decide to not use this service.

That's the heart of the Jevon's Paradox.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#63

Post by bufferoverflow »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #48

"Fairly big countries" is such a cop out. What do you mean by big? Population? Economy? Energy consumption? The original twitter post just says "More electricity than many countries". The fact that Google and Microsoft consume the same order magnitude of electricity as Nigeria (population 220 million), Ireland (population 5 million), Ecuador (18 million), Slovakia (5 million), Iceland (population 0.4 million), really…

A country with the population 220 million is big, no matter how you slice it.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#64

Post by edhelas »

Bognar wrote: post #42
edhelas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Microsoft and others are directly buying electricity from nuclear and renewable sources, doing some major greenwashing this way. https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow... By doing that they force all the others to rely on the "other" sources (gas, coal...) and not replace fast enough those ones with clean sources. The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to b…

> The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition. This doesn't make sense. If big players are eating up all the renewable sources, then the renewable sources are making money hand over fist and are encouraged to expand. The market forces should speed up overall production of renewables, not slow it down.

Is this plan actually help decomittioning fossil fuel ? I have some doubts.

Adding more renewable on top help having... more renewable, that's great, but if you don't have a clear plan to remove the fossil fuel (meaning closing down coal, gas, oil sources) you don't change the emissions pathway.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#65

Post by taftster »

Devasta wrote: post #37

Depends on what they are doing. Consuming a large amount of energy for cloud platforms isn't the worst, as that'd be done by the customers directly if the cloud didbt exist after all. Using it on generative AI on the other hand is burning huge amounts of energy, manpower and effort on a robot that advises how to cook spaghetti in gasoline for flavor. A complete waste.

I wonder though, if compute was solely on-premise, would we be using so much of it?

My instincts tell me that because the cloud is so easy to spin up new computation resources, that we're just using that much more of it. If a company had to buy the hardware, buy the licensing, buy the time of the system administrator, would they scale up as large?

The cloud has driven efficiency gains. But those gains have been consumed and, under the premise above, even exceeded. The cloud might very well be contributing to more energy use than it would have otherwise.

Unsure on this, of course. Just a gut feeling. It would be interesting if someone did an actual study on this.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#66

Post by atiedebee »

grecy wrote: post #2

Given how wildly profitable they are, we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources, where X approaches 100%. This would be a jobs program that would also help the planet. Win win. Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.

This won't solve anything, you're just moving the non-renewable energy usage to all the consumers

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#68

Post by ikekkdcjkfke »

energy123 wrote: post #27
mrweasel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could/should(?) be fixed by taxing CO2 emissions. I'm not sure what it works in e.g. the US, but some countries have this stupid idea that electricity prices have a build in CO2 tax, but applied to all consumptions, not just that produced by CO2 emitting sources. Let's say Microsoft could save 25% on their electricity bill by consuming power from wind farms, I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training w…

The ship has sailed on carbon taxes. It's good policy but voters don't like it, so politicians will never do it. Voters have shown to be okay with direct subsidies and permitting reform, so that's what we must do out of sheer pragmatism.

All other measures than procing in the externalities will create perverse incentives to suck up subsidies and grants. It just uses the power of the market to figure out the best

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#69

Post by ClumsyPilot »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #30
prepend wrote: post #25

This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries. Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

That ain't new. East India company had essentially private armies.

And what a glorious time period that was, lawless and brutal.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#70

Post by ClumsyPilot »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #48

"Fairly big countries" is such a cop out. What do you mean by big? Population? Economy? Energy consumption? The original twitter post just says "More electricity than many countries". The fact that Google and Microsoft consume the same order magnitude of electricity as Nigeria (population 220 million), Ireland (population 5 million), Ecuador (18 million), Slovakia (5 million), Iceland (population 0.4 million), really…

Ireland is sizeable first world country, the rest is polemics
Post reply on HN