Also, the fact they they announce not how much computing power they are going to deploy but rather how much electricity it's going to use (as if power usage is a useful measurement of processing power) is kind of gross.
"Good news everybody, your power bills are going up and your creaking, chronically underfunded infrastructure is even closer to collapse!"
Build this thing in the middle of the desert and you would need around 100 sq mile of solar panels + a fuck load of batteries for it to be energy independent. The solar farm would be around $10 billion which is probably far less than the gpus cost
100 square miles is small in the American southwest. And a solar farm would disrupt the ecosystem much less than many other land uses. Adding shade and cover will benefit many species.
Burning 10GW of fossil fuels for 20 years while waiting for the nuclear plants to finish building will do far more damage to the environment than 100 square miles of shade in the desert.
Environmentalists are just against progress. A few desert species going extinct is not a big deal. It's an arid wasteland. When we eventually terraform it (with desalinated water from solar / fusion) those species are going to die out anyway.
I assumed this headline was not aimed at the public, but at some utility they want to convince to expand capacity. Otherwise, bragging about future power consumption seems a bit perplexing.
Exactly this. This is essentially a new consumer tax in your electrical bill. The buildout of the electrical grid is being put on consumers essentially as a monthly tax with the increase in electrical costs. Everyone in the country is paying for the grid infrastructure to power these data centers owned by trillion dollar companies who aren't paying for their needs.
Yep. Consumers are screwed and $500/month electric bills are coming for the average consumer within a year or two. We do not have the electricity available for this.
