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How AI labs are solving the power problem

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Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#71

Post by windexh8er »

pdpi wrote: post #7

Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W. So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.

Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously.

> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.

What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.

And then we get this gem...

> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.

So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.

This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#72

Post by O5vYtytb »

pingou wrote: post #4

What about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?

How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#73

Post by Aurornis »

estearum wrote: post #51
Aurornis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The natural gas turbines used are relatively efficient as far as engines go. Having them on-site makes transmission losses basically negligible. Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.

I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density! 1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful. 2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solution…

> I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument.

Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I’ll try to respond.

That said, you’re putting forth your own disingenuous assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected to the grid.

Arguing pedantry about the word efficiency isn’t helpful either. The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that. The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.

Disingenuous is acting like this is a permanent solution to the exclusion of others. The whole point is that it gets them started now with portable generation that is efficient.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#74

Post by zozbot234 »

Apreche wrote: post #6

> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Citation needed.

If you do the math, that's $10-$12 per watt year. There's approx 24×365.25=8766 hours in a year, so assuming that the datacenters would be running 24×7, that boils down to $1.14 to $1.37 in revenue per kWh. That's not a bad deal if power really is a major part of the expense.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#75

Post by Aurornis »

Symmetry wrote: post #52
Aurornis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boom’s pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers wasn’t surprising when data center deployments started using turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking point. What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything…

I had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in airplanes were more different from the turbines in power plants than they actually are.

Boom doesn’t actually have a turbine yet. Their design partner publicly pulled out of their contract with Boom a while ago.

Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It’s one of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever they’re doing in public is just PR right now. Until they actually produce something (other than a prototype that doesn’t resemble their production goals using other people’s parts) their PR releases don’t mean a whole lot.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#76

Post by Aurornis »

codingdave wrote: post #35

This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money." It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.

> This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."

Like every other industry in the world?

I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#77

Post by qchris »

I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative.

> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.

> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!

The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.

[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/

[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#78

Post by Aurornis »

windexh8er wrote: post #71
pdpi wrote: post #7

Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W. So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.

Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously. > An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year. And then we get this gem... > Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It ha…

> What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.

This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.

I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#79

Post by estearum »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
estearum wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density! 1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful. 2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solution…

> I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I’ll try to respond. That said, you’re putting forth your own disingenuous assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected to the grid. Arguing pedant…

The gas turbines are hopefully an intermediate solution due to the long and not guaranteed process of grid connection and renewable buildout. History is of course full of such bets that did not work out the way their proponents hoped.

> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.

It's obvious that you're starting from your conclusion and working backwards, which is probably how your initial comment was full of so much motivated reasoning to begin with.

In your mind, is there any set of negative externalities that would justify not building the data centers, or at least not building them now, or at least not building them now in specific areas that require these types of interim solutions?

Re: How AI labs are solving the power problem

#80

Post by Aurornis »

dannersy wrote: post #32
Aurornis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is coming from a group that does analysis on the semiconductor and cloud industries and provided very expensive access to their models and info. They are the citation.

I mean, if so then they are lying through their teeth.

Based on what? I’m inclined to trust a well known industry analyst over an HN comment with no basis.
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