91–100 of 104 posts
MWh per day? TWh per year? In what world are these sensible units of power ? Why can't we just use Watts FFS? Btw: 1 MWh per day ≈ 42 kW 1 TWh per year ≈ 114 MW Or: All Chat GPT users: 850 MWh / day = 310 GWh / year ≈ 35.4 MW All AI users: 15 TWh / year ≈ 1.7 GW
One thing it's doing is jacking up electricity rates for US States that are part of the [PJM Interconnection grid]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJM_Interconnection ). It's a capacity auction price that is used to guarantee standby availability and it is [up significantly]( https://www.toledochamber.com/blog/watts-up-why-ohios-electr... ) at $270.43 per MW/day, which is far above prior years (~$29–58/MW/day) and thi…
The lack of investment in energy infrastructure - especially dispatchable power sources and grid transmission - is finally coming to bite us. Datacenters are simply the final straw/tipping point, and make a convenient scapegoat. At some point you run out of the prior generation's (no pun intended) energy investments. Efficiency gains only get you so far, eventually you need capital investment into actually building t…
My thoughts. Current gen AI is going to result in the excess datacenter equivalent of dark fiber from the 2000's. Lots of early buildout and super investment, followed by lack of customer demand and later cheaper access to physical compute. The current neural network software architecture is pretty limited. Hundreds of billions of dollars of investor money has gone into scaling backprop networks and we've quickly hit…
This. I totally agree we will see better architectures for doing the calculations, lower energy usage inference hardware and also some models running on locally moving some of the "basic" inference stuff off the grid. It's going to move fast I think and I would not surprised if the inference cost in energy is 1/10 of today in less than 5 years.
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Yeah, something we are confident about is that a) training is where the bulk of an AI system's energy usage goes (based on a report released by Mistral) b) video generation is very likely a few orders of magnitude more expensive than text generation. That said, I still believe that data centres in general - including AI ones - don't consume a significant amount of energy compared with everything else we do, especiall…
You gotta start thinking about the energy used to mine and refine the raw materials used to make the chips and GPUs. Then take into account the infrastructure and data centers. The amount of energy is insane.
At the end of the day green energy is perfect for AI and AI workloads.
Math comparing new datacenter capacity to electric cars - Projections estimate anywhere between 10GW to 30GW of US datacenter buildup over the next few years 1GW of continuous power can support uniform draw from ~2.6M Tesla Model 3s assuming 12,000 miles per year, 250Wh/mile. So 26M on the lower end, 80M Model 3s on the upper end. That's 10x-30x the cumulative number of Model 3s sold so far And remember all datacente…
>The Schneider Electric report estimates that all generative AI queries consume 15 TWh in 2025 and will use 347 TWh by 2030; that leaves 332 TWh of energy—and compute power—that will need to come online to support AI growth. T +332TW is like... +1% of US power consumption, or +8% of US electricity. If AI bubble burst ~2030... that's functionally what US will be left with (assuming new power infra actually built) mid/…
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Back in the 1980s, I'm sure Philip Morris' claimed similar numbers on cigarettes (not) causing cancer as R.J. Reynolds did. I also wouldn't be surprised if Aramco and Rosneft gave similar estimates on global warming and oil's role in it.
"Does smoking cause cancer?" and "Does burning fossil fuels cause global warming?" are a different category from "How much energy does it take to run a prompt?" The prompt energy question is something that companies can both actively measure and need to actively measure in order to plan their budgets. It's their job to know the answer. Those other questions, sadly, fall more into the category of it's their job not to…
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I think the point is that we all need to use less energy, we need to avoid flights from LA to Tokyo where possible, not using the energy use as an excuse to use even more energy.
Do we need to use less energy, or do we need to use less fossil fuel based energy?
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Why are consumers paying for electricity used by server farms? Why can't the electricity companies charge the server farms instead? Where I live, the utility company bills you at a higher rate if you use more electricity.
> consumers paying for electricity used by server farms wait what? consumers are literally paying for server farms? this isn't a supply-demand gap?
Data centers get commercial or maybe even industrial rates depending on their grid hookup and utilities love predictable loads. Those are lower than residential rates. If you're dishonest and don't understand the cost of operating a grid, you could say that's users paying for data centers. But then you'd need to apply it to every commercial/industrial user.
If the regular users were paying for data centers usage, why are so many of them going off-grid with turbines or at least partially on-prem generation?
The solution is more and cheaper energy.