A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise

I worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all.

They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs.

The big question is were to build them. There are only a few places with cheap and plentiful power. One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big and there is a lot of regulation). Another is Texas (except their grid isn't very stable). And the last is China. And you can't build a datacenter in China unless you're Chinese.

It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones.

Energy efficient computing is a very exciting field. I hope it will get more attention driven by these economic constraints.

As a short teaser: Landauers principle suggests that the energy required to erase one bit off information is bounded from below by k_BTln(2). This could lead us down a path towards reversible computing, to avoid energy costs for deleting information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

Why Nvidia is desperate to get back to China: https://youtu.be/DMVAqABLkxk?si=FsyHMGmGEVPUGAot