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.
>With the talk of AI data centers' impact on the world,
The global impact of data centers is negligible. There are measurable local impacts. It remains a small percentage of global electricity use. Electricity is less than a quarter of world energy use (increasing that percentage is one of the best things we can do because long term renewables win).
There are local demands for data centers. Infrastructure strain, from new builds etc.
A lot of that is dependent on the local situation, for instance water use in any area that performs regular irrigation will have additional use of water, but the relative quantities lean heavily towards irrigation.
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.
Lerc · · focus · HN ↗
The global impact of data centers is negligible. There are measurable local impacts. It remains a small percentage of global electricity use. Electricity is less than a quarter of world energy use (increasing that percentage is one of the best things we can do because long term renewables win).
There are local demands for data centers. Infrastructure strain, from new builds etc.
A lot of that is dependent on the local situation, for instance water use in any area that performs regular irrigation will have additional use of water, but the relative quantities lean heavily towards irrigation.