At Amazon's biggest data center, everything is supersized for AI

The limits are described by Carnot's theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna...

Also important to remember when calculating this for yourself that the temperatures must be represented using an absolute scale (i.e. Kelvins or degrees Rankine).

Using heatpumps you only need a little electricity to heat quite a few homes with district heating.

But there probably is no nearby district to be heated.

For the previous generation, AWS had a split where Trainium == model training and Inferentia == inference. With the current generation, they are also recommending smaller Trainium configurations for inference.

Even if nobody trains another model, the Trainium chips will be useful for inference of existing models that have been recompiled for it.

I am more on the AI skeptic side (LLMs are not a path to general intelligence, most positions cannot be 100% replaced with any version of product I have seem to date), but I fully agree. Some form of AI text generation is likely to be here forever. Maybe it gets vastly more efficient per clock cycle, but compared to N years ago, all of the tech vendors need more compute to offer this service.

Yeah, it's not a significant amount of land. But it does seem like these companies prefer to take quality farmland instead of unused land. There's something similar happening near my town, where a company wants to put a big solar array on some prime farmland, and the locals are asking why that spot and not getting an answer. It might save a small amount on development, as farmland is fairly flat and has no trees to remove, but that's miniscule in the overall budget for these things, and rough ground would be much cheaper to buy. But the corporation behind it and the government entities involved are digging in their heels and insisting on using farmland, without any explanation why.

So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.

It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.

The problem is not the amount of land but if that land is economically viable. Farm already has low margins.so, if you grab a good location to build a data center and push the farm land even further away from population centers, then you are pretty much killing family farms.

One of the major problems facing American agriculture is that there are fewer and fewer farmers/farming families.

Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround.

Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment.

Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.

Also whether the farmland requires irrigation. In Ohio, there’s not much irrigation. In Indiana, you see it a lot more. In Idaho, it’s basically a hard requirement

This seems pretty bad faith.

The problem with what xAI is doing in Memphis is they were originally running "temporary" generators for over a year (effectively permanently ...) without meeting emission requirements a permanent generator would need to.

Sure, it's not xAI's fault the local power grid isn't suitable for their datacenter but the problem here is that xAI is effectively not following the law.

As far as "industrial" neighbors go, a datacenter is a pretty good one to have vs an abandoned husk vs an active polluter/nuisance, at least if that datacenter isn't run by a selfish psychopath that tacked on a bunch of gas burning generators to power the thing.

It was definitely farm fields growing crops, you can look in Google Earth and see for yourself.

Edit: Anywhere in the Midwest where there is a large expanse of flat ground will almost always be growing crops or have a town built on it. Undeveloped land is almost all hilly and forested or floodplain, nowhere where you could put a data center.

Yeah. The power use is impressive, although still only 1/10th of the output of the largest power station in the world, the three gorges dam. The water use is not really a big deal at all. I don’t know why journalists inevitably have to mention both. And even the power numbers require much more careful contextualization.

I wish I had a good balanced article to link to when these discussions come up, one that really digs into the power use question and compares it to the power consumed by other human activities and capital projects. Does anyone know of one?

Doesn’t a typical McDonald’s require millions of gallons of water each week just for the beef alone, without even considering things like drinks and ice and boiling potatoes and washing floors?

By pointing out the obvious you miss out jumping on the bandwagon of everyone writhing in pain over how devastated they are for the environmental impact. Whenever AI is brought up you have to remind people how unsustainable it is and how it’s all about to fall apart and how the value isn’t there, among other topics. Off topic/on topic I’m reminded of death reports during COVID for particular states. When I went to go and look at the statistics of years prior to compare, they were at par if not less than the few previous years. Just an example of uncontrolled (mostly manipulative) outrage in action. I’d like to expect better of HN but I don’t: I’ve lost all respect for the moderation (dang and now tom) here over the years.

For very hot data centers, evaporative cooling is still popular. This is from 2012 but I doubt much has changed.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/gett...

Nope. Evaporative cooling.

It's a laudable goal to match human intelligence but we can't ignore the cost for too long. If humans can create the same reasoning for cheaper why would we chug along on this path? And this may be the case when the AI hype bubble pops and real economics take over.

No, but we had done a pretty good job of storing and indexing it all on this thing called the Internet.

> It’s processing power to provide produce near unlimited spam and millions of pictures of shrimp jesus

ftfy

> At this point we have to be glad it's not coal.

it will be if the coal price drops far enough

xAI is natural gas, not diesel.

We could not build new data centers and focus on fixing the real issues instead.

We could always revisit this decision once clean power is actually available.

Cover the roof in solar panels and use the power to do something useful instead of running bullshit generators.

Or maybe a park with some oak trees and a frisbee golf course idk.

You say that as if nuclear was bad?

False equivalence bias

It is not for inference so population or market does not matter, this is only for training and only for Anthropic, which is pretty unprecedented in the history computing/internet.

> all the poorer countries with large populations

It won't move the needle even if this infra is exclusively for inference.

These projects are based on a economic thesis. Companies are investing $10s-100B / year expecting to make the money and more back.

At this scale of money RoI will not come from parts of the world with per capita GDP in the low thousands or less even if there are billions of them and all of them are expected to use these new tools.

This is same reason Apple is the richest company in the world despite selling a fraction of droid devices. Every mobile app developer knows all money is only in iOS. The top 10% people in the world as a market can make a company much more than the rest 90% combined.

I'd imagine they would build those data centers closer to those populations.

Megathrust earthquakes are pretty common around the world. Some of them cause major damage, such as the ones in 2004 and 2011. But even then, the impact is mostly regional.