> The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an A.I. system that matches the human brain.
Sentences like this never ceases to amaze me. All of this juice to attempt to match what a single human brain can do with its relatively low resource requirements.
> Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating.
Growing corn on that same 1200 acres would require on the order of a billion gallons of water. People have no sense of just how much water agriculture consumes.
In all probability, putting a data center on farm land is greatly reducing water consumption.
Yeah. The power use is impressive, although still only 1/10th of the output of the largest power station in the world, the three gorges dam. The water use is not really a big deal at all. I don’t know why journalists inevitably have to mention both. And even the power numbers require much more careful contextualization.
I wish I had a good balanced article to link to when these discussions come up, one that really digs into the power use question and compares it to the power consumed by other human activities and capital projects. Does anyone know of one?
Doesn’t a typical McDonald’s require millions of gallons of water each week just for the beef alone, without even considering things like drinks and ice and boiling potatoes and washing floors?
By pointing out the obvious you miss out jumping on the bandwagon of everyone writhing in pain over how devastated they are for the environmental impact. Whenever AI is brought up you have to remind people how unsustainable it is and how it’s all about to fall apart and how the value isn’t there, among other topics. Off topic/on topic I’m reminded of death reports during COVID for particular states. When I went to go and look at the statistics of years prior to compare, they were at par if not less than the few previous years. Just an example of uncontrolled (mostly manipulative) outrage in action. I’d like to expect better of HN but I don’t: I’ve lost all respect for the moderation (dang and now tom) here over the years.
I think you’re conflating things. It’s not a single human brain. It’s processing power to provide the human trove of knowledge and reasoning at the beck and call of millions of people nearly simultaneously. No single person would be able to do that.
It's a laudable goal to match human intelligence but we can't ignore the cost for too long. If humans can create the same reasoning for cheaper why would we chug along on this path? And this may be the case when the AI hype bubble pops and real economics take over.
Considering the human brain evolved over hundreds of millions of years of evolution (what a lot of data!) that almost seems cheap to do in the span of a number of months to train a model.
Im a bit clueless on this subject but I've been wondering why isn't this heat used productively to, say, generate electricity. Why aren't AI datacenters for example use the heat to provide the municipality with hot water for example?
Electricity from heat is generated by temperature differences. Large differences are much more efficient than small differences and data centers are "small differences" for these purposes.
Unless you can use the heat directly, it won't be worth it to convert it into electricity.
Also important to remember when calculating this for yourself that the temperatures must be represented using an absolute scale (i.e. Kelvins or degrees Rankine).
The server/ML GPUs are not great for gaming, they strip out all the specialized shader/pixel units to cram in more general compute cores.
In theory you could write games with just those but aside from the amount of work needed I'm not sure if the performance would be good enough, the specialized texture samplers etc can be faster than general purpose compute shaders.
Also, for cloud gaming you want very low latency, so few GPUs all over the world in local POPs, not a lot of GPUs in few large data centers.
This feels like saying when the dot-com bubble burst, could the servers be re-purposed as mainframes. Whatever about valuations and individual stocks, AI/LLM workloads are only going up.
I am more on the AI skeptic side (LLMs are not a path to general intelligence, most positions cannot be 100% replaced with any version of product I have seem to date), but I fully agree. Some form of AI text generation is likely to be here forever. Maybe it gets vastly more efficient per clock cycle, but compared to N years ago, all of the tech vendors need more compute to offer this service.
Putting aside possible specialization of hardware and differences for applications, cloud gaming was tried and largely flopped. Related for the power intense use-cases where it could be useful to outsource had too much latency involved. Remember Strada?
"Trainium accelerator" doesn't sound like it would be terribly useful outside it's current niche. It's not clear how much of the spend is that kind of thing versus general purpose compute and storage.
For the previous generation, AWS had a split where Trainium == model training and Inferentia == inference. With the current generation, they are also recommending smaller Trainium configurations for inference.
Even if nobody trains another model, the Trainium chips will be useful for inference of existing models that have been recompiled for it.
"The utility told regulators in April that it expected to use natural gas plants to provide about three-quarters of the additional power that would be needed by 2030"
Not a good news here.
>A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium.
Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields
This comment got me wondering whether loss of farmland in the US is a serious issue.
It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances.
That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently.
In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
Yeah, it's not a significant amount of land. But it does seem like these companies prefer to take quality farmland instead of unused land. There's something similar happening near my town, where a company wants to put a big solar array on some prime farmland, and the locals are asking why that spot and not getting an answer. It might save a small amount on development, as farmland is fairly flat and has no trees to remove, but that's miniscule in the overall budget for these things, and rough ground would be much cheaper to buy. But the corporation behind it and the government entities involved are digging in their heels and insisting on using farmland, without any explanation why.
So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.
It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.
The problem is not the amount of land but if that land is economically viable. Farm already has low margins.so, if you grab a good location to build a data center and push the farm land even further away from population centers, then you are pretty much killing family farms.
One of the major problems facing American agriculture is that there are fewer and fewer farmers/farming families.
Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround.
Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment.
Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.
Also whether the farmland requires irrigation. In Ohio, there’s not much irrigation. In Indiana, you see it a lot more. In Idaho, it’s basically a hard requirement
The problem with what xAI is doing in Memphis is they were originally running "temporary" generators for over a year (effectively permanently ...) without meeting emission requirements a permanent generator would need to.
Sure, it's not xAI's fault the local power grid isn't suitable for their datacenter but the problem here is that xAI is effectively not following the law.
As far as "industrial" neighbors go, a datacenter is a pretty good one to have vs an abandoned husk vs an active polluter/nuisance, at least if that datacenter isn't run by a selfish psychopath that tacked on a bunch of gas burning generators to power the thing.
I don't know about Indiana, but in Texas companies buy farmland because it's often available near population centers and infrastructure. And the land is available because the existing owners do just enough farming/ranching to qualify for the lower tax category.
Why? Hold outs, zoning, greedy politicians and more. I drove through a blighted neighborhood. There were 60-70% unkempt houses and maybe 10-15% in great shape. Some won't want to move for their own reasons and they'll refuse to sell. Some will just be trying to get more money. Others will be sincere. It's very hard to unsubdivide land.
And then there are the zoning and city regulations which naturally resist. You would think they would welcome a new taxpayer, but they're really in love with the regulations that someone wrote decades ago. The odds of getting them to bend is anyone's guess, but in most cases a bribe or ten is going to be required.
This particular site is being built basically in the parking lot/backyard of a steel mill, so it sort of is brownfield. I have a hunch that “empty cornfield” is just the author using some artistic freedom instead of saying “an empty field in the Midwest”.
It was definitely farm fields growing crops, you can look in Google Earth and see for yourself.
Edit: Anywhere in the Midwest where there is a large expanse of flat ground will almost always be growing crops or have a town built on it. Undeveloped land is almost all hilly and forested or floodplain, nowhere where you could put a data center.
At this point we have to be glad it's not coal. After all we have a president that just passed an executive order to foster the "Beautiful Clean Coal Industry"
It is not for inference so population or market does not matter, this is only for training and only for Anthropic, which is pretty unprecedented in the history computing/internet.
> all the poorer countries with large populations
It won't move the needle even if this infra is exclusively for inference.
These projects are based on a economic thesis. Companies are investing $10s-100B / year expecting to make the money and more back.
At this scale of money RoI will not come from parts of the world with per capita GDP in the low thousands or less even if there are billions of them and all of them are expected to use these new tools.
This is same reason Apple is the richest company in the world despite selling a fraction of droid devices. Every mobile app developer knows all money is only in iOS. The top 10% people in the world as a market can make a company much more than the rest 90% combined.
Readit News
Sentences like this never ceases to amaze me. All of this juice to attempt to match what a single human brain can do with its relatively low resource requirements.
Growing corn on that same 1200 acres would require on the order of a billion gallons of water. People have no sense of just how much water agriculture consumes.
In all probability, putting a data center on farm land is greatly reducing water consumption.
I wish I had a good balanced article to link to when these discussions come up, one that really digs into the power use question and compares it to the power consumed by other human activities and capital projects. Does anyone know of one?
ftfy
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/gett...
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I don't think any rational person outside of the hype cycle thinks LLM s are emulating a human brain in a meaningful way.
Unless you can use the heat directly, it won't be worth it to convert it into electricity.
Also important to remember when calculating this for yourself that the temperatures must be represented using an absolute scale (i.e. Kelvins or degrees Rankine).
But there probably is no nearby district to be heated.
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Though, maybe Midjourney or other niche AI companies could buy it for the right price I guess.
In theory you could write games with just those but aside from the amount of work needed I'm not sure if the performance would be good enough, the specialized texture samplers etc can be faster than general purpose compute shaders.
Also, for cloud gaming you want very low latency, so few GPUs all over the world in local POPs, not a lot of GPUs in few large data centers.
Even if nobody trains another model, the Trainium chips will be useful for inference of existing models that have been recompiled for it.
Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields
It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances.
That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently.
In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.
It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.
Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround.
Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment.
Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.
You mean precisely like xAI did in Memphis? Build on the site of an abandoned factory—a historically disadvantaged, low-income industrial zone?
I couldn't imagine anyone having anything negative to say about that.
The problem with what xAI is doing in Memphis is they were originally running "temporary" generators for over a year (effectively permanently ...) without meeting emission requirements a permanent generator would need to.
Sure, it's not xAI's fault the local power grid isn't suitable for their datacenter but the problem here is that xAI is effectively not following the law.
Indiana is about 23 million acres.
And then there are the zoning and city regulations which naturally resist. You would think they would welcome a new taxpayer, but they're really in love with the regulations that someone wrote decades ago. The odds of getting them to bend is anyone's guess, but in most cases a bribe or ten is going to be required.
Edit: Anywhere in the Midwest where there is a large expanse of flat ground will almost always be growing crops or have a town built on it. Undeveloped land is almost all hilly and forested or floodplain, nowhere where you could put a data center.
Sad, but expected.
it will be if the coal price drops far enough
We could always revisit this decision once clean power is actually available.
Or maybe a park with some oak trees and a frisbee golf course idk.
Jesus
The demand from all the poorer countries with large populations is only going to go up as their kids grow up with tech.
> all the poorer countries with large populations
It won't move the needle even if this infra is exclusively for inference.
These projects are based on a economic thesis. Companies are investing $10s-100B / year expecting to make the money and more back.
At this scale of money RoI will not come from parts of the world with per capita GDP in the low thousands or less even if there are billions of them and all of them are expected to use these new tools.
This is same reason Apple is the richest company in the world despite selling a fraction of droid devices. Every mobile app developer knows all money is only in iOS. The top 10% people in the world as a market can make a company much more than the rest 90% combined.