One thing about these numbers that's absolutely shocking to me is how low the energy use is:
> That model’s usage was well within our budget ($68, about 4kWh of energy use / 365 grams of carbon emissions).
The energy cost is literally 1% of the total cost. For context, 4kWh of energy would drive you about 15 miles in an EV, about half of the average person's daily driving miles. It's boiling 10 gallons of water.
With the talk of AI data centers' impact on the world, you'd think this would be 10x to 100x the amount of energy in order to get the effects they're using here.
My takeaway: the AI data center buildout is an overbuild probably at least as large as the fiber buildout that left us with so much dark fiber. If not even bigger. The only thing that will save the economy is the inability of NVIDIA and chip fabs to produce enough chips to match the buildout planned.
Yeah the whole data center environmental panic seemed astroturfed to me. I took a look at the numbers and it’s not that bad. If you telework one day instead of commuting you make up for over a week of heavy AI use, and the water use is on par with an average golf course.
There are noise issues in some places. But the panic is excessive. Like nuts.
Maybe environmental panics are to the left what moral panics about stuff like trans people are to the right.
How is it excessive and nuts? If anywhere else is like it is by me, they've been ramming a bunch of giant warehouses at the least, and the increased noise both from the operation itself and the loss of natural barriers blocking other noise, light, and air pollution is really noticeably degrading things. And from what I understand, data centers are even worse due to their increased use of cooling and things like gas generators. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that people are pissed off and increasingly so.
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
> That model’s usage was well within our budget ($68, about 4kWh of energy use / 365 grams of carbon emissions).
The energy cost is literally 1% of the total cost. For context, 4kWh of energy would drive you about 15 miles in an EV, about half of the average person's daily driving miles. It's boiling 10 gallons of water.
With the talk of AI data centers' impact on the world, you'd think this would be 10x to 100x the amount of energy in order to get the effects they're using here.
My takeaway: the AI data center buildout is an overbuild probably at least as large as the fiber buildout that left us with so much dark fiber. If not even bigger. The only thing that will save the economy is the inability of NVIDIA and chip fabs to produce enough chips to match the buildout planned.
api · · focus · HN ↗
There are noise issues in some places. But the panic is excessive. Like nuts.
Maybe environmental panics are to the left what moral panics about stuff like trans people are to the right.
duskdozer · · focus · HN ↗