The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence are so energy hungry that they’re heating up their surroundings, according to new research. It’s an alarming finding given the number of data centers is predicted to explode over the next few years.
100% of electricity burned turns to heat save light that leaves earth. Gigawatt data center? Thata 650,000 space heaters.
i work for a large power company, we have a data center customer that have as many equally sized cooling towers as one of our nuclear power plants.
Pretty soon you’ll just have nuclear plants just to power data centers.
Didn’t Microsoft try to pay for a nuclear plant to be recommissioned just to power a data centre or something?
There have been several data centers that have bought nuclear plants, including Three Mile Island, they’re going to fire that bitch back up, also the Regulators have been disempowered. Propublica on the last part if I recall.
Nuclear plants to power data centers to make ai slop to make more need for data centers to feed us ai ad slop…when does it fucking end?
I hope some vigilantes start taking action against these damn wastes if space.
The disease is late stage capitalism, the symptom is a mad dash to trade our natural resources for energy and pollution. The mad dash will continue as long as we’re bleeding humanity to keep the shareholders high and dry.
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Isn’t the largest data center currently something like 100MW? So “only” 0.1GW…65.000 space heaters is still insane though.
That currently exist? I believe Colossus is pushing 150MW and aiming for 300. But Gigawatt centers are on the way
I mean, it’s a bit disingenuous to use a GW example in relation to the article, when the largest currently in operation is 0.15GW
we were asked 400MW for a new data center, we told them 100MW is the max we could go for now, and could increase later, we have a new natural gas plant soon to enter operation to replace two retiring coal plants, but looks like we’re extending decommission targets to keep demand
The planet is fucked.
Oh. I originally put megawatt and thought that was too small so I just incremented the metric exponent.
You can have a complex of multiples though and they to congregate near each other for short interconnection.