Power: The answer to and source of all your AI datacenter problems In the datacenter biz, power is the product. You either have it or you don't, Chris Sharp tells El Reg. The CTO of colocation provider Digital Realty explains that without power, there are no servers, no storage, no GPUs, and none of those AI tokens that have Wall Street in a frency. But power isn't only the limiting factor in …
I really, perhaps foolishly, hope that governments around the world prioritise consumer grids - power and water - for use of citizens. There is not much point in accommodating all the hardware, both currently proposed and future, if we, the people of the planet are left unable to drink or power our homes, heating and devices; where will the tech bros find their paying customers?
No no no, you fool! Once they have connected all the multi-Gigawatt datacentres across the globe, the super-duper-intelligent AGI singularity will surely have been achieved! Because something that burns more energy than all life on earth must be more intelligent, right.
Then, the AGI will invent a new pathogen/bomb/terminator to destroy all humans, except for the squillionaire-class in their bunkers, and thus the world will be Reborn! Yeats has foretold it! And Girard has explained it!
Just like in Deus Ex, or James Bond, or 1984, etc etc.
They literally believe they are "righteous supervillains". Where's JC Denton when we need him?
Or, more hopefully: They are simply deluded; There will be nothing more than accelerated stupidity and waste to come out of all these interconnected AI superhubs, and good old economics will come along to burst their cult bubble sooner rather than later.
Thanks for reminding me about Deus Ex. I have forgotten the quote of Thomas Aquinas at the start of the first game, or if it's even relevant, oh well. Your post has reminded me how much I enjoyed the franchise and now reminded, I still have them on my gog account and I sense a set of replays coming on.
"We can either provide cheap and plentiful power, light and warmth for our citizens, or we can throw money we haven't got at a tool that vaguely summarises meetings, writes terrible insecure code, and is worse at searching out facts than even google is now. Which is it to be?"
"This is too deep and hard a question for mere governments to opine on!"
"You're right. I'll ask Copilot..."
Such tools cannot write any code - all those can do is copy combinations of existing code (except of course also removing the copyright information as wanted).
As almost all of the input code is bad and also insecure, "surprisingly", the output code is almost always bad and insecure.
... then AI supply must be outstripping AI demand and OpenAI is making money hand over fist by jacking up prices to profit, profit, profit. Strange ... is something is not adding up?
Meanwhile China is spending less on datacenters but more on manufacturing automation and other quick to profit applications of AI.
In short, with regards to AI, China appears to be overtaking the US on following capitalist principles with respect to AI investment, while the US is 100% focused on creating an almighty God to be mediated with through annointed human holy prophits, all in the name of the Holy AI Crusades.
China has for maybe the last 20-30 years acted like the US did after WW2. Politics aside, they have been practical in achieving their goals to become a manufacturing juggernaut. And they have succeeded and appear to be poised to continue to succeed. They offer products to the world at attractive prices. And it appears China has locked in the new energy era with their rare earths strategy which has played out over decades. China thinks 5-50 years, the west thinks 1-4 quarters. They have figured out how to game capitalism.
Quite so. However this statement - the west thinks 1-4 quarters requires a deeper look.
Firstly, financial returns of some sort over the next 1-4 quarters are indeed actually important, anywhere in the world, but those returns are increasingly derived from changes in stock prices and are increasingly speculative. There is a reasonable argument that this is a good thing in that the stock purchases are like long term loans that appreciate as the company gets closer to the date when profitability is achieved and the stocks start paying dividends. I.e., it enables looking 10 years ahead.
However a closer look reveals that the long term net rise in the stock market has been assisted by repeated government intervention (fiddling with bonds, reserve requirements, QE, psuedo-QE) and the rise of ETFs, which makes the whole thing too big to fail. There is a reasonable argument that this is a bad thing, because it is the antithesis of capitalism that keeps the beast alive with government life support, and has enabled monopolies or generally the largest players, K-street lobbyists, and the financial industry (now conjoined with bitcoin) to thrive at the expense of smaller businesses. It has also kept the dollar high, encouraging outsourcing, and hurting manufacturing exports - which have proven to be problematic.
So what does this have to with rapid expansion of Datacenters and online computing power? There is an argument that this is a modern form of manufacturing - making tokens - which is a form of productivity. This argument goes that this can be the US' answer to China's 50 years of government subsided physical exports and domination of manufacturing. In 50 years the world will rely on (exponentially closer to) "AGI" tokens the same way that the US now relies on Chinese manufactured goods. Except that it won't be US government supported but supported by justified speculative stock prices.
I've run out of time but that just won't work.
... is just the latest in a long line of cost externalisations.
Your bit barn may be ever-more closely stuffed with silicon, but it's likely going to require ever-greater total land use for power generation and transmission and for collecting basic resources such as water that may be needed for cooling. And, as other people have already pointed out, there is already competition for those external resources and they're only likely to be available at an affordable cost in the quantities required by also externalising the costs of pollution and social dislocation. It's a classic case of warming your hands on the coal fire in the grate and ignoring the teetering spoil heap that's about to consume the town.
We've had industrialisation for long enough to know how this will ultimately pan out.
What really strikes me is Jensen suggesting by 2027 a single rack will consume 600MW. That is a small town in ONE rack of many. My quick look says a DC can have anywhere from 15K-100K racks. So 100K of these 600MW racks would consume 60TW. Basically one DC would consume the current consumption of the state of Texas. God knows how much water it would consume to cool this monster. Probably all the water in Texas as well. Please someone tell me my math is wrong.
Yep, I misread the article, 600KW/rack. But weirdly I got the TX thing right. As I write this grid in the whole state is doing around 50GW. So I double booboo'ed, TX grid is not 60TW, it runs around 60GW. So while my numbers were incorrect, both off by a factor of an even 1000, the thesis was. One big DC of these things would consume the same as current consumption of the state of TX. Obviously after installed, would only be 1/2, assuming there is only 1 on this grid, and assuming the grid expands enough to support it. Currently it would not. There would be a blackout with current generation resources available.
Americans for the most part don't care about tea. We are a coffee culture, not a tea culture, and coffee pots are self heating.
With that said, my tea kettles (mostly cheapies made by Hamilton Beach) have 6 built-in temperature settings, ranging from boiling to 160F (71C), for specific needs.
I do not know any Americans who think the hot tap is adequate for brewing tea. Unless, of course, the "hot tap" is an instant boiling water tap, which many people have.
>Americans for the most part don't care about tea.
Or about cricket, or apparently about many other activities which would be judged a mark of civilization. Perhaps tea would be a start ?
>We are a coffee culture
And yet "pumpkin spice" is a thing
>I do not know any Americans who think the hot tap is adequate for brewing tea.
I give you the abomination known as Starbucks
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