OpenAI CEO Sam Altman invests in solar power firm Exowatt to fuel AI datacenters

Solar energy company Exowatt has launched with the financial support of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, alongside two other investors. It's not clear how much Altman is ploughing into Exowatt, but the Wall Street Journal reports he personally will be joining Andreessen Horowitz and Atomic in funding the power company with $20 million …

[b0llchit]

/me silly?

It is an interesting observation that all that new "green" power is used to power al lot of additional power consumption.

/me is naive and thought that we needed to replace "old and dirty" power with "green" power and conserve power usage.

Yes, /me is just silly /me

[Anonymous Coward]

Greenwashing

"One of the biggest problems of our time is figuring out how to power a future of abundant, cheap artificial intelligence without harming the planet," Abraham said. "Our mission at Exowatt is to do this at scale with a modular approach and bring the cost of electricity down to $0.01 per kWh over time."

Great, but could we have this cheap clean electricity MINUS the AI please?

For now, it's just a pipe dream created for nothing else then justifying the building of huge extremely power hungry AI bitbarns with a vague promise that "they" are working on green cheap energy to power it... someday. Someday they will start on working on trying to build it, maybe. Greenwashing!

[jmch]

"Great, but could we have this cheap clean electricity MINUS the AI please?"

Power is power, if we can get abundant, cheap, clean energy, there would be no reason to not use it on frivolities such as AI or Bitcoin. Just for a glimpse at the scale though.... currently LCOE electricity generation costs are around 5c / kWh for grid-scale solar or wind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#/media/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg). This almost certainly includes inbuilt subsidies.

So excuse me if I take it with a pinch (or sack) of salt if someone says they can reduce that cost by a factor of 50 if only they can get enough scale.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look Squirrel!

It seems to me that they have moved from funding some blue sky energy development to straight out diversionary "development" whose only expected outcome is distraction