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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Direct Current Data Centers
phtrivier wrote 17 min ago:
I'm curious about Handmeier's opinion on location of data centers.
Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with
data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)
Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with
electricity networks)
He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires
going to be an limiting factor ?
bob1029 wrote 1 hour 19 min ago:
From a purely engineering perspective I think it becomes difficult to
argue with the gas turbine once you get into the gigawatt class of data
center. The amount of land required for this much solar is not to be
understated. In many practical scenarios the solar array would need to
be located a distance away from the actual data center. This implies
transmission infrastructure which is often the hardest part of any
electrical engineering project. You can put a gigawatt of N+1
generation on a 50 acre site with gas. It's dispatchable 24/7/365 and
you can store energy for pennies on the dollar at incredible scale.
Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best
solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel
however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I
believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data
center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators
indefinitely.
cinntaile wrote 37 min ago:
If you have predictable demand at that scale, nuclear might make more
sense than the combination of gas and solar.
hjoutfbkfd wrote 55 min ago:
they are talking about covering the desert with solar panels. why
would you not put the data center in the middle of it?
sethops1 wrote 44 min ago:
Simply because latency is a competitive advantage, one worth paying
for. At the speed of light, making a trip out to the desert and
back is too slow.
hjoutfbkfd wrote 21 min ago:
20 ms extra, for models which respond in 5 minutes
hambes wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
it is difficult to comprehend for me that soneone spends all this time
thinking through and calculating how to harness as much energy as
possible and then wants to use it for large language models instead of
something useful, like food production, communication, transport or any
other way of satisfying actual human material needs. what weird
priorities.
hjoutfbkfd wrote 54 min ago:
if anything we are producing too much food
and what communications you find lacking?
phtrivier wrote 20 min ago:
Food distribution is still a problem in vast part of the world.
Handling food waste is another issue.
Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they
only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago,
coffee and chocolate more recently, etc... [1] [2] [3] I don't know
if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to
better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create
more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...
But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's
completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to
improving chatbots is smart.
I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first
world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this
usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different
from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D
gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2
out of the air / transporting beans, etc...
But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using
electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger,
as some people claim:
URI [1]: https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-an...
URI [2]: https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-condi...
URI [3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-c...
URI [4]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-alt...
scellus wrote 49 min ago:
the main bottleneck for the civilization in communications
currently is the sparsity of cynical, negative HN comments
stingraycharles wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
Sometimes (often) solving the problem is the most fun part,
regardless of how itâs used.
The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard,
and thereâs a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that
seems to me a decent reason to think about that.
I havenât heard yet that food production is constrained by these
kind of things.
It appears to make that youâre just taking a cheap jab at AI.
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
Why are we wasting resources on toy chatbots?
boxed wrote 10 min ago:
If you think this is what LLMs are, then you are a bit behind the
times. Opus 4.5 is a huge step up. The previous generation was good
for starting basic hobby projects, now we can do pretty big
time-consuming changes with it.
I have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of LLMs for a long
time, but after a certain level of improvement you have to realize
that at least for programming the advantages are substantial.
Joel_Mckay wrote 27 min ago:
Borrowing state money that ultimately indentures a country with
over-engineered massive boondoggle projects.
That regulatory capture con strangled more emerging economies than
most like to admit. =3
"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good
Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
Havoc wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Slightly OT, but I see the Chinese are talking about space DCs now too
which would suggest they reckon it could work too. (Unlike me and
others here)
Galanwe wrote 38 min ago:
Not a physician, but wouldn't space be terrible for heat dissipation?
hhh wrote 1 hour 31 min ago:
datacenters in space are a great way to claim vast amount of viable
orbit space for a stupid project to eventually sell the slot for
something else when itâs rarer.
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