9GW datacentre approved.
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek as Ed Zitron loves to remind us, _approved_ does not mean it will ever get built.
This will be fought tooth and nail at every inch of the process.
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Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek plus the use of drinking water. In Spain, they already have desertification made by a data center ...
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People need to understand that these datacentres are not just for generating fun pics, they're intended to replace workers en masse, and they're going to ultimately replaces wages.
And there's no way Universal Basic Income will be even considered, and notwithstanding the BS that Musk has been spouting recently in favour of UBI.
@Shivviness
Add to this the surveillance/analysis/control (Palantir) that will be run on these systems. -
@quixoticgeek hang on the thing runs on gas, so an f1 engine gives a vague idea of how much gas its going to need. ~A Saturn five first stage fuel tank every fifteen minutes (rounding to a nice round number)
If you've ever seen a person standing next to a Saturn five you have an idea how utterly absurd an amount of fuel that is.
With out the pipeline that places shuts down. And we thought the back hoe through the fiber link was a bad problem.@mindpersephone @quixoticgeek Okay those comparisons are kind of really unusable, you should compare a GW to the average electricity use of about 1 million homes (without heating/cooling)
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@mindpersephone @quixoticgeek Okay those comparisons are kind of really unusable, you should compare a GW to the average electricity use of about 1 million homes (without heating/cooling)
@mindpersephone @quixoticgeek The question here is if there’s a market to this much compute, do you think the average person will consume an extra 1kW for inference in 2030? Maybe in the US where natural gas is free right now.
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@Shivviness
Add to this the surveillance/analysis/control (Palantir) that will be run on these systems.Precisely.
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@CppGuy you'd need 45km² of solar to generate 9GW or solar, but assuming the sun is only out for a ⅓rd of the time, you'd probably need closer to 135km², plus the battery storage...
@quixoticgeek @CppGuy make the solar array 1km wide and run it around the equator. Punctuate it with datacentres every 45km and turn them on and off as the sun goes around. Simple.
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@quixoticgeek @CppGuy make the solar array 1km wide and run it around the equator. Punctuate it with datacentres every 45km and turn them on and off as the sun goes around. Simple.
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@quixoticgeek @CppGuy they can fill floats with natural gas and extend the road over the sea.
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Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek But if it's in a desert it's using locally produced solar power with zero emissions, isn't it?
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek @inthehands
They just need to add a geothermal plant to run on the extreme heat generated by the data centerAnd feed that power back to run the data center
️ Free energy!
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@freya @quixoticgeek yeah this pretty much a scam project, considering that AI usage is falling and crash is inevitable
@peteriskrisjanis @freya @quixoticgeek This was my immediate reaction. Almost none of these projects are actually building anything - it's all an imitation of growth on paper.
I miss when these companies made things.
Also on behalf of Canada I apologize for Kevin O'Leary, although he has tried his best to distance himself from us for decades.
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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek it's running on methane, so it emits NOx and SOx instead of CO2.
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See the Colorado River is filled up with water from snow melt that's is eternal, neverending and limitless so.......
@mycotropic @quixoticgeek as one of tens of non-Americans, I had to look it up and it looks like it's doing great!

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9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek It's not approved yet. Let's hope it never gets approved.
https://www.ksl.com/article/51489496/amid-questions-and-concerns-box-elder-county-leaders-delay-action-on-data-center-proposal -
9GW datacentre approved. I'm trying to get my head round the scale of this. The whole of the UK uses about 40GW of electricity. So this one facility is a quarter of the UK grid. In one location. I had to look up box elder county on Wikipedia. "Its territory includes large tracts of barren desert,". Right, so a datacentre that uses the same amount of electricity as a quarter of the UK. In a fucking desert. And that's before we even consider the CO2 emissions. Yikes.
New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
The 40,000-acre project will run entirely off-grid using natural gas.
Tom's Hardware (www.tomshardware.com)
@quixoticgeek
lmao wtf is this world mg ngl doomed we all are… T_T -
@quixoticgeek And not a single panel of solar?
And... when it fails, will they turn it into another detention centre for people they don't like?
@Remittancegirl @quixoticgeek Covering the whole thing in solar panels would still be just a tiny drop in the ocean of that 9 GW though.
Take one of those solar car ports as an example I happen to have some data for: Roughly 70x15 meter, with 360 solar panels. Its max power output ever is 164 kW. That's about 450W per panel, pretty much its theoretical maximum capacity.
You'd need over 50000 of these things to get to 9 GW and that's before you factor in things like clouds, and nights.
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@mycotropic @quixoticgeek as one of tens of non-Americans, I had to look it up and it looks like it's doing great!

"Water for the Las Vegas valley is piped from the bottom of Lake Mead, through what is known as “the third straw.” The Southern Nevada Water Authority built that pipe at a cost of around $1.5 billion, and it is the only pipe operating now. The two others are no longer below the lake’s surface.
The Colorado River supplies 90% of the water for Southern Nevada, and provides water for 40 million people on its course to the Mexican border and out to the Gulf of California."
Water woes: Colorado River getting less snow, sending projections for Lake Mead lower
Forecasts keep going from bad to worse for water in the West, and a new report released Friday brought more bad news for the outlook at Lake Mead.
KLAS (www.8newsnow.com)
As long as the policy is "do not use water in any way" then I agree with that article!
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@quixoticgeek That means 6GW of heat get dissipated into the atmosphere one way or another. Energy is neither created nor destroyed, just released into the atmosphere from where it was bound up as natural gas.
What’s the impact of 6GW of additional heat on the climate?@bouriquet not much.
The heat itself from the datacenter is negligible compared to other sources of heat from the earth's perspective.
The CO2 emissions however are the problem, because they help trap heat from the sun.
The sun irradiates the earth with ~0.18EW which is around 10.000 times the power that human civilization uses in total. So adding a few GW to that isn't going to move the needle.
Except these datacenters run on fossil fuel
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Based on an estimate of 500g CO2/kWh, the one facility would emit ~40MT of CO2 a year. If this one facility was a country, it would rank about 67th, just behind Bulgaria.
Concentrating this much energy use in a single location is going to change weather patterns. The environmental impact is just mind boggling.
The AI bubble can't burst soon enough.
@quixoticgeek how is it going to change weather patterns? It certainly might, I guess, but are there any simulations of this that you know of?