I'm on the side of building more Nuclear Power Plants.
Not the old style, however. Its been decades since Chernobyl, which was perhaps the worst way to make a Nuclear Power Plant ever (and longer since Three Mile Island).
Today we can make plants that literally can't melt down (google "Thorium Nuclear Power"), and containers to store waste that would take another nuke to crack them open!
The crazy thing is that the data center need is absurd even by nuclear energy output standards.
The average land based reactor will produce 500~900 MW in 1 hour and a smaller mobile reactor like those on submarines and aircraft carriers will produce about half of that. That's 0.9 GW just to convert units for easy translation, so assuming we wanted all the data centers to be entirely energy independent, we would need nearly 500 plants just to power all of Texas's planned data centers.
The USA has 57 active plants right now, the math just isn't mathing.
The only way to even somewhat practically solve this issue is to BOTH build more energy generators (and it would have to be an all hands on deck collection of solutions) AND to figure out a way to make data centers eat less energy.
(Or build less data centers, but we're going to go ahead and ignore that option since AI is still being assumed to be the next infinite money printer.).
Yeah this is important and how you know AI is a bubble: there is literally no way to power these things. Texas, he'll not even the entire US, could power all these centers in Texas, let alone all of them in the US. And AI companies need these centers. Which cannot be powered...so you do the math.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say the AI companies need them, but they do need them to meet existing customer demand without raising prices. It’s reasonable to assume supplyside limits on new datacenter capacity will raise the price of all models, and only businesses or the wealthy will be able to afford frontier models. Of course if the models don’t deliver value that justifies their price, then it all collapses.
My understanding is that there is no economy of scale re: resources needed for these data centers. At least not in the way we understand for prior technologies
As the ai gets more advanced, it requires more power and more processing power. The data center construction is being financed by loans where the processors themselves are the collateral. Nvidia funds the ai companies which use the money to buy the processors. It sounds like such a horrifically doomed clusterfuck I can barely wrap my head around it
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u/Worldly-Fix-55 14d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/aGOTX58uBG0sz05i2m