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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

#61

Post by _heimdall »

y-curious wrote: post #37
crote wrote: post #27

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, whic…

I am not an electricity/wiring guy so maybe you can help me understand. I thought aluminum is dangerous to wire with because it is a fire hazard (I bought a home this year and this was a prominent warning in my reading). Is that because it needs to be done very carefully? I imagine most data centers would not mess with a fire risk on such a scale.

Unless I'm mistaken, the risk with aluminum is that it can expand and contract if it gets too hot. Aluminum sized properly with the correct connectors torqued to spec would be fine, aluminum wires in a residence with a DIYer working on it can be riskier and is why inspectors will always note it.

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

#62

Post by 9dev »

tlb wrote: post #39
program_whiz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 huma…

No one will ever agree on when AI systems have equivalent functionality to a human brain. But lots of jobs consist of things a computer can now do for less than 100W. Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

> Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

Add to that the tier-n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.

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

#63

Post by crote »

y-curious wrote: post #37
crote wrote: post #27

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, whic…

I am not an electricity/wiring guy so maybe you can help me understand. I thought aluminum is dangerous to wire with because it is a fire hazard (I bought a home this year and this was a prominent warning in my reading). Is that because it needs to be done very carefully? I imagine most data centers would not mess with a fire risk on such a scale.

That's the "a pain to work with" part.

Residential aluminum is a Really Bad Idea because DIY Dave will inevitably do something wrong - which then leads to a fire hazard. Copper is a lot more forgiving.

But a large scale datacenter, solar farm, or battery storage installation? Those will be installed and maintained by trained electricians, which means they actually know what a "torque wrench" is, and how to deal with scary words like "corrosion" and "oxidation".

Like I said: it's what's used for most of the power grid. With the right training it really isn't a big deal.

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

#64

Post by scherlock »

y-curious wrote: post #37
crote wrote: post #27

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, whic…

I am not an electricity/wiring guy so maybe you can help me understand. I thought aluminum is dangerous to wire with because it is a fire hazard (I bought a home this year and this was a prominent warning in my reading). Is that because it needs to be done very carefully? I imagine most data centers would not mess with a fire risk on such a scale.

Aluminum oxide has high resistance and if you mix aluminum wiring with copper outlets, etc the impedance mismatched is what causes fires. You need to either have special copper pigtails installed or use fixtures that are rated for aluminum wiring.

For commercial installs, it shouldn't be a problem as long as it's planned for.

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

#65

Post by literalAardvark »

EA wrote: post #56
literalAardvark wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The original meter (1790s France) was defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian.

Not sure if you're correcting me, but yes, that is "a" path around the Earth.

It's not the most aesthetic one, but it was at the time the most able to be measured.

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

#66

Post by Aurornis »

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…

The world of financial analysis and modeling is broad. It’s common to give these tasks to juniors and expect them to grind through it when the output doesn’t really matter.

In this case the output wasn’t actually used for financial modeling. If it had been, it would have been caught immediately when someone put it into a table where they calculated the price or the supply constraints or anything else.

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

#67

Post by Aurornis »

MSFT_Edging wrote: post #44
y-curious wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an electricity/wiring guy so maybe you can help me understand. I thought aluminum is dangerous to wire with because it is a fire hazard (I bought a home this year and this was a prominent warning in my reading). Is that because it needs to be done very carefully? I imagine most data centers would not mess with a fire risk on such a scale.

Old aluminum wiring in your walls with cloth insulators, designed for a time where electricity consumption was a small fraction of today's electrified usage is dangerous because you're overloading an old, unprepared system. Aluminum bus bars(solid, often exposed) would be designed for the required power levels and installation criteria.

Aluminum home wiring was from the 60s and 70s. It’s not the same as cloth covered knob and tube from earlier years. It has its own problems, but I’d take a house with knob and tube over a house with aluminum wiring.

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

#68

Post by wongarsu »

9dev wrote: post #62
tlb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one will ever agree on when AI systems have equivalent functionality to a human brain. But lots of jobs consist of things a computer can now do for less than 100W. Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation.

> Also, while a body itself uses only 100W, a normal urban lifestyle uses a few thousand watts for heat, light, cooking, and transportation. Add to that the tier- n dependencies this urban lifestyle has—massive supply chains sprawling across the planet, for example involving thousands upon thousands of people and goods involved in making your morning coffee happen.

Wikipedia quoted global primary energy production at 19.6 TW, or about 2400W/person. Which is obviously not even close to equally distributed. Per-country it gets complicated quickly, but naively taking the total from [1] brings the US to 9kW per person.

And that's ignoring sources like food from agriculture, including the food we feed our food.

To be fair, AI servers also use a lot more energy than their raw power demand if we use the same metrics. But after accounting for everything, an American and an 8xH100 server might end up in about the same ballpark

Which is not meant as an argument for replacing Americans with AI servers, but it puts AI power demand into context

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

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

#69

Post by jandrewrogers »

These kinds of errors are not rare in the media.

Even among engineering fields routine handling of diverse and messy unit systems (e.g. chemical engineering) are relatively uncommon. If you work in one of these domains, there is a practiced discipline to detect unit conversion mistakes. You can do it in your head well enough to notice when something seems off but it requires encyclopedic knowledge that the average person is unlikely to have.

A common form of this is a press release that suggests a prototype process can scale up to solve some planetary problem. In many cases you can quickly estimate that planetary scale would require some part of the upstream inputs to be orders of magnitude larger than exists or is feasible. The media doesn't notice this part and runs with the "save the planet" story.

This is the industrial chemistry version of the "in mice" press releases in medicine. It is an analogue to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

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

#70

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

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!

But it's already a nice round 10m/s in base 299,792,458.
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