SoftBank to build massive AI datacenter on former US nuclear weapons site

Softbank's SB Energy is redeveloping Department of Energy (DoE) land in Ohio for a massive datacenter campus, adding extra generation facilities and power infrastructure alongside it. The Japanese investment giant's digital infrastructure and energy arm is leasing federal land at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant …

[Rich 2]

10GW

Why is everyone measuring the size of server farms in GW? It’s totally meaningless.

Measuring it in hectares (or even football pitches) would be more useful

[cyberdemon]

Re: 10GW

Because investors and politicians don't know the difference between a Megaflop and a Yottaflop (and FLOPs as a measure becomes meaningless when some idiot decides that 4 bits can be a floating point number)

That, and because the tech twits have tacitly admitted that Moore's law is dead. nvidia is making ever denser racks with faster interconnects, but the fundamental compute efficiency has plateaued.

So the fundamental bottleneck of AI compute has now become "how much power can you feed and cool it with". It's far more important than hectares of land use, because while they do use a lot of land, the power is the most expensive commodity that they are using.. If land were a problem, they would stack more than two floors - except they generally don't, because 10kA busbars are expensive and transformers are heavy.

[Jon B]

Re: 10GW

10GW is absolutely huge - double New Zealands entire country usage

[werdsmith]

Re: 10GW

10GW of 1950s Elliot vacuum tube compute power.

[JacobZ]

Re: 10GW

Serious answer: because the available power is the limiting factor in the capability of a datacenter. It's defined initially and baked into the construction, and increasing it is a major construction exercise.

By contrast, the amount of processing power is something you might target at the beginning of construction, but by the time the facility is online, you really don't know what processors will be capable of for a given power consumption. And even if you did, that number is going to change repeatedly over the lifespan of the building.

Similarly, the footprint of the building is not telling you much about the capabilities.

[iron]

> 10-gigawatt (GW) server farm.

> SB Energy will also build 10 GW of new generation capacity... feeding both the local grid and the datacenter.

Except the entire 10 GW will be needed by the 10 GW datacenter so the local grid gets 0 GW, at best, when all the turbines are turning.

[Rich 2]

Mmmm… you saw through that plan eh?

[retiredFool]

Ah but the grid will get to subsidize the capital costs since they are connected. So rates will go up.

[Nate Amsden]

would be pretty shocked

if this even gets to 10% of it's intended capacity before they surrender due to high costs/lack of investor money to throw at it.

[Clausewitz4.1]

Re: would be pretty shocked

” if this even gets to 10% of it's intended capacity”

I assume there is too much circular money invested, so it can reach much more than 10% of capacity

[Clausewitz4.1]

Returns on investment

Well done.

Now you ONLY need to have a good ROI for the project to be successful.

[Lon24]

Re: Returns on investment

The sudden rise in energy prices must be sending a lot of AI business plans even further south. Praying that the Middle East 'excursion' is merely a blip will be mighty brave. Cease fire now does nothing for the long term antipathy between Israel & Iran which appears unresolvable.

[retiredFool]

Re: Returns on investment

Yes I fear a blip is a pipe dream.

[JacobZ]

Softbank

You know the end is near when Softbank is committing billions.

[IGotOut]

Is this the same Softbank

That keeps pledging AI investment money that it simply doesn't have?

Yes, yes it is.