[HN Gopher] How AI labs are solving the power problem
___________________________________________________________________
How AI labs are solving the power problem
Author : Symmetry
Score : 92 points
Date : 2025-12-31 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsletter.semianalysis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsletter.semianalysis.com)
| Symmetry wrote:
| I found Boom's pivot much less confusing after this article.
| leetrout wrote:
| For those like me that are missing context:
|
| https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...
| Aurornis wrote:
| Boom's pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers
| wasn't surprising when data center deployments started using
| turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their
| investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking
| point.
|
| What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom
| announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of
| this idea. They're actually a me-too that won't have anything
| ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in
| airplanes were more different from the turbines in power
| plants than they actually are.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Boom doesn't actually have a turbine yet. Their design
| partner publicly pulled out of their contract with Boom a
| while ago.
|
| Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It's one
| of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever
| they're doing in public is just PR right now. Until they
| actually produce something (other than a prototype that
| doesn't resemble their production goals using other
| people's parts) their PR releases don't mean a whole lot.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom
| announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of
| this idea. They're actually a me-too that won't have anything
| ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
|
| My first thought when seeing that article is "I can buy one
| of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could've ordered
| one at any time in the last 50 years."
| torginus wrote:
| What I didn't get is afair Boom doesn't build engines, aren't
| they using some old 50s-60s fighter jet engines?
| goda90 wrote:
| Power problem: solved
|
| Natural Gas supply problem: worsened
|
| Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened
| protimewaster wrote:
| Yeah, that headline made me think "Oh good, there's some
| solution on the horizon that won't require absurd amounts of
| electricity."
|
| Not so.
| corimaith wrote:
| Coincidentally the USA is more than self sufficient in natural
| gas and is a net exporter. Drill baby drill!
| twism wrote:
| supply is finite
| imglorp wrote:
| And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to
| health problems for the neighbors.
|
| This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.
|
| I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai
| deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human
| jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.
|
| https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...
| lukan wrote:
| I assumed gas plants are pretty good in terms of air quality?
|
| Coal plants are bad.
| condensedcrab wrote:
| Gas plants are not bad... but imagine 400 MW of gas plants
| in a concentrated area. You'll always have NOx and SOx by
| products whenever you're burning gas.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It depends on if they treat the exhaust to remove nitrogen
| oxides. Not sure what the standard is for this kind of
| plant though.
| imglorp wrote:
| In the case of Grok's turbines, no emissions controls means
| sick people. Plus all the CO2 pushing climate collapse
| faster which hurts every coming generation.
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-
| memph...
| macNchz wrote:
| Gas is certainly less of a problem than coal, but they
| still produce plenty of bad stuff: nitrogen oxides and bad
| VOCs like formaldehyde that are well studied to increase
| risk of asthma and some types of cancer. I certainly
| wouldn't want to live close to one.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is
| effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-
| related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical
| fuckups of the government
| saghm wrote:
| Yeah I guess I'm not the target audience for this because I
| assumed that "the power problem" was "massive increase in
| electricity costs for people despite virtually unchanged usage
| on their part", not "AI companies have to wait too long to be
| able to start using even more power than they already are":
|
| > Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near
| Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said
| her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. "You look
| at that and think, 'Oh my god,'" she said. She has now become
| the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights
| and unplugging her daughter's cellphone chargers.
|
| > And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes
| in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor
| people struggling with their own power bills. "It's utilities
| versus rent," she said. "They want to stay in their home, but
| they also want to keep their lights on."
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I understand the instinct but if people seriously think that
| they are solving any problem by unplugging cell phone
| chargers, they are simply bad at math. Human time is easily
| worth more than that, even when working at minimum wage.
|
| That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising
| for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak
| of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some
| special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper
| scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I
| have not done the math.
| esseph wrote:
| They are not necessarily bad at math, but they probably
| aren't electricians or EEs or have ever needed or been
| asked to calculate how much power a cell phone charger
| uses.
|
| Mom/Dad used to unplug things and turn lights off, so they
| do too.
| tehjoker wrote:
| How many paid hours do they get? Human time isn't fungible
| with paid hours.
| Aurornis wrote:
| The natural gas turbines used are relatively efficient as far
| as engines go. Having them on-site makes transmission losses
| basically negligible.
|
| Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced
| without any difficult to mine elements will make some people
| happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data
| centers aren't really a global concern at the same level as
| things like transportation.
| miltonlost wrote:
| > as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers
| aren't really a global concern at the same level as things
| like transportation.
|
| Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary
| pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental
| problems that AI usage can have by their increased power
| consumption.
|
| Natural gas engines are efficient!
|
| Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby
| neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human
| lives not matter?
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-
| memph...
| estearum wrote:
| I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of
| the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive
| in its density!
|
| 1. Nobody complained about the _efficiency_ of natural gas
| turbines. You can _efficiently_ do a lot of useless stuff
| with deep negative externalities, and the fact it 's
| _efficient_ is not all that helpful.
|
| 2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by
| much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better
| solutions!
|
| 3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about
| beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and
| fuel consumption."
|
| 4. There are many problems that are significant and worth
| thinking about even if they are not the largest singular
| problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined
| criteria
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware
| of the disingenuousness of this argument.
|
| Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I'll try to
| respond.
|
| That said, you're putting forth your own disingenuous
| assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines
| are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to
| the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected
| to the grid.
|
| Arguing pedantry about the word efficiency isn't helpful
| either. The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone
| who gets triggered by that. The gas turbines are an
| efficient way to power them while waiting for grid
| interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
|
| Disingenuous is acting like this is a permanent solution to
| the exclusion of others. The whole point is that it gets
| them started now with _portable_ generation that is
| efficient.
| estearum wrote:
| The gas turbines are _hopefully_ an intermediate solution
| due to the long _and not guaranteed_ process of grid
| connection and renewable buildout. History is of course
| full of such bets that did not work out the way their
| proponents hoped.
|
| > The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who
| gets triggered by that.
|
| It's obvious that you're starting from your conclusion
| and working backwards, which is probably how your initial
| comment was full of so much motivated reasoning to begin
| with.
|
| In your mind, is there any set of negative externalities
| that would justify _not_ building the data centers, or at
| least not building them _now_ , or at least not building
| them _now_ in _specific areas_ that require these types
| of interim solutions?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is exactly right. These are glorified emergency
| generators, and grid power is ordinarily far cheaper;
| especially for interruptible loads like training new
| models (checkpointing work in progress and resuming it
| later is cheap and easy). The article mentions that quite
| clearly.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who
| gets triggered by that.
|
| Unnecessarily smug?
|
| Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a
| lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to
| be built without much understanding of the public
| utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that
| energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for
| residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this
| argument.
|
| > The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them
| while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm
| renewables to come online.
|
| I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only
| when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral
| timeframe that may or may not exist.
| einrealist wrote:
| The word 'pollution' appears exactly one time in this entire
| thing, the word 'community' or 'communities' never.
| quikoa wrote:
| This website appears to be very AI heavy in articles. I think
| it's fair to say these articles are biased because of that.
| wyldfire wrote:
| The only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in
| the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do,
| in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look
| like the most affordable option, because they're not.
| einrealist wrote:
| True. The same is true for nuclear energy. I never heard of
| a nuclear power plant that did not receive substantial
| subsidies throughout lifetime. Not to forget the nuclear
| fuel and the efforts required to create it and later to
| store it.
| torginus wrote:
| And imagine all this poorly located, overpriced, haphazardly
| thrown together and polluting infrastructure will basically get
| flushed down the toilet once either the AI bubble pops, or they
| figure out a new way of doing AI that doesn't require terawatts
| of power.
| pingou wrote:
| What about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer
| to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long
| time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them
| to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?
| thunderbird120 wrote:
| Takes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front
| investment, and requires a lot more land.
|
| The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power
| from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition
| plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to
| the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough
| land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery
| infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short
| timescales are key.
| memoriuaysj wrote:
| land. compute what surface you need for 1 GW of solar
| Aurornis wrote:
| Reciprocating natural gas engines can be moved from [concrete]
| pad to pad and be up and running in under 24 hours. The
| portable turbines take longer but they're still fast.
|
| Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a
| very long time by comparison.
| condensedcrab wrote:
| The density required for solar is also much lower - the
| coordination between different land parcels and routing power
| and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem
| gas turbines.
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have
| say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours
| without sun you need at least two of the largest battery
| install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy
| days.
|
| [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-
| battery-...
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by
| power, by all means, offer users a discount when their
| queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to
| save cents to fill up their tanks - you can't say there isn't
| precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better
| question is, is it really a constraint?
| justincormack wrote:
| Doesnt really work, as the biggest cost is buying GPUs etc
| which has to be paid for, and leaving them idle when the
| sun isnt shining doesnt pay the purchase costs. Their are
| industries where this does work though.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| The customers time is not flexible like that.
|
| And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > The customers time is not flexible like that.
|
| haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend
| playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing
| in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually
| quite flexible
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The customers time is not flexible like that.
|
| A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible.
| Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use
| naturally follows the sun anyway.
|
| > And every second GPU is not working, it's not making
| money
|
| Some companies already have more chips than they can
| feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle
| part of the night.
| kube-system wrote:
| You both are talking about this stuff as if it is a new
| concept. Demand-based pricing is already commonplace for
| both electricity and compute.
|
| The demand for both compute and electricity is higher
| while people are awake and using them. But not all demand
| is realtime, and some will shift in response to prices.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| Our kids are not going to be happy we spun up more CO2 generation
| for this.
| memoriuaysj wrote:
| their uploaded minds will enjoy the infinite AI slop though
| linsomniac wrote:
| I hear they LOVE Sanctuary Moon.
| Apreche wrote:
| > An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per
| gigawatt, annually.
|
| Citation needed.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is coming from a group that does analysis on the
| semiconductor and cloud industries and provided very expensive
| access to their models and info. They are the citation.
| Apreche wrote:
| So I guess it's not a bubble then since these companies are
| raking in the big revenues? Or maybe they are counting all
| those circular investments as revenues somehow?
| airstrike wrote:
| Revenue isn't profit, and the presence or absence of
| either, separately or jointly, isn't sufficient to
| determine there is a bubble.
| throw10920 wrote:
| You can make a lot of money but still be in a bubble if
| speculation is significantly higher than (actual or
| potential) revenue.
|
| I think that's most people's assumption. It's not that AI
| is _worthless_ , but that it's significantly less valuable
| than investors are betting on.
| dannersy wrote:
| I mean, if so then they are lying through their teeth.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Based on what? I'm inclined to trust a well known industry
| analyst over an HN comment with no basis.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If you do the math, that's $10-$12 per watt year. There's
| approx 24x365.25=8766 hours in a year, so assuming that the
| datacenters would be running 24x7, that boils down to $1.14 to
| $1.37 in revenue per kWh. That's not a bad deal if power really
| is a major part of the expense.
| jsnell wrote:
| As far as I can tell, power isn't actually a major part of
| the expense, it's dwarfed by the capex. Just the amortization
| on the GPU will be an order of magnitude higher than the cost
| of the power to run the GPU at 100%. (Assuming a 5 year
| depreciation period.)
| mikelitoris wrote:
| "Could", sure... and I "could" fly if I strapped a jet engine
| to my ass
| pdpi wrote:
| Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how
| wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how
| brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of
| the art" -- 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W.
|
| So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W
| budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI
| targeting that power budget.
| saagarjha wrote:
| That's about the energy a laptop or two uses at full tilt.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| try to calculate 12312312.123213 * 123123.3123123
|
| A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.
|
| It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.
|
| EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to
| make the gap even bigger.
| talideon wrote:
| A GenAI does not, however.
| sayamqazi wrote:
| GenAI completely fails to even get the right answer to
| numeric problems
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| You can't compare a training run that produces a file which can
| be run forever after to a human day
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Inference itself is also very costly!
|
| But either way, how many human lives are spent making that
| file?
| dale_glass wrote:
| Not really.
|
| I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15
| seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many
| times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my
| consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can
| type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to
| type.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Is "faster" really what we are talking about right now?
| It could be a lot faster to take a helicopter to work
| everyday too, versus riding a bike.
|
| Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power
| obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not
| that much"?
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| There's a billion users. Why do we make massive cities
| and factories and fields if humans only need 2000
| calories a day
| butlike wrote:
| idk, why?
| discreteevent wrote:
| > It could be a lot faster to take a helicopter to work
| everyday too, versus riding a bike.
|
| Great analogy.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's not a good analogy at all, because of what they said
| about mundane hardware. They're specifically not talking
| about any kind of ridiculous wattage situation, they're
| talking about single GPUs that need fewer watts than a
| human in an office to make text faster than a human, or
| that need 2-10x the watts to make video a thousand times
| faster.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Speed highly correlates with power efficiency. I believe
| my hardware maxes out somewhere around 150W. 15 seconds
| of that isn't much at all.
|
| > Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge,
| power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its
| not that much"?
|
| I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in
| general anything that serves millions of requests in a
| small footprint is going to look pretty big.
| butlike wrote:
| An LLM gives AN answer. If you ask for not many more than
| that it gets confused, but instead of acting in a human-
| like way, it confidently proceeds forward with incorrect
| answers. You never quite know when the context got
| poisoned, but reliability drops to 0.
|
| There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless.
| Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image
| generation is drivel. But...
|
| The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't
| trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine.
| (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's
| single purpose).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay, but this has vanishingly little to do with the
| comment chain you replied to, which was about energy
| efficiency.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Is it though? When I ask an LLM research questions, it often
| answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon
| to figure out with traditional research.
|
| Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific
| simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.
|
| Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would
| guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have
| required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if
| I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the
| energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my
| home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way
| more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.
|
| If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much
| more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for
| the same amount of work.
| discreteevent wrote:
| For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need
| to kill the people that AI makes redundant. This is apart
| from the fact that right now we are at a choke point where
| it's much more important to generate less CO2 than it is to
| write scientific simulation code a little quicker (and most
| people are using AI for much more unnecessary stuff like
| marketing)
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would
| need to kill the people that AI makes redundant._
|
| That is certainly not a logical leap _I 'm_ making. AI
| doesn't make anybody redundant, the same way mechanized
| farming didn't. It just frees them up to do more productive
| things.
|
| Now consider whether LLM's will ultimately speed up the
| technological advancements necessary to reduce CO2? It's
| certainly plausible.
| throwaway-11-1 wrote:
| Honest question - what are artists being freed up to do
| that's more important? DoorDash?
| usefulcat wrote:
| > it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an
| entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.
|
| In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the
| energy required for training the LLM.
|
| LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of
| knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of
| general intelligence.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Training energy is amortized across the lifespan of a
| model. For any given query for the most popular commercial
| models, your share of the energy used to train it is a
| small fraction of the energy used for inference (e.g. 10%).
| exitb wrote:
| How so? A human needs the entire civilisation to be productive
| at that level. If you take a just the entire US electricity
| consumption and divide it by its population, you'll get a
| result that's an order of magnitude higher. And that's just
| electricity. And that's just domestic consumption, even though
| US Americans consume tons of foreign-made goods.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken
| seriously.
|
| > An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars
| per gigawatt, annually.
|
| What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and
| it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
|
| And then we get this gem...
|
| > Wartsila, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized
| the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI
| clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter
| contracts.
|
| So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO2e per kWh using
| something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these
| workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of
| power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being
| held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
|
| This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being
| applied to procure energy in any way possible with little
| regard to health or environmental impact.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast
| and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
|
| This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing
| financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor
| industry and AI companies.
|
| I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT
| guess.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Are you sure they don't have a vested interest? At least
| ChatGPT gave me sources.
|
| It doesn't matter who they are if there's nothing backing
| it up.
|
| The entire article is predicated on the fact that this is
| profitable long term.
|
| Again: > An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion
| dollars per gigawatt, annually.
|
| Yet this simple fact isn't justified at all nor is it
| stated what "AI cloud" actually is or how they got to those
| numbers.
| rixed wrote:
| Ah! And don't get me started about how specific its energy
| source must be! Pure electricity, no less! Where a human brain
| comes attached with an engine that can power it for days on a
| mere ham sandwich!
| redox99 wrote:
| How much energy did evolution "spend" to get us here?
|
| I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.
| Magnets wrote:
| you didn't consider the 18+ years we have with almost no
| productivity and the extra resources required to sustain life
| dkobia wrote:
| Interesting choice of names: "Solar Turbines" - a wholly owned
| Caterpillar subsidiary that designs and manufactures industrial
| gas turbines.
|
| That said, it is all pretty impressive.
| sameesh wrote:
| "xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using
| truck-mounted gas turbines and engines."
|
| So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel.
| Got it.
| miltonlost wrote:
| And all without the proper permits! Using 35 generators when
| they were only allowed 15! Yay! So glad we're allowing AI
| companies to break law after law after law to not be able to
| reason logically the basic Towers of Hanoi.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
| thrance wrote:
| > Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry
| by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple
| innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy
| strategy was the most impressive. xAI entirely bypassed the grid
| and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and
| engines.
|
| Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered
| such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote
| this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil
| fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything
| else.
| sam-cop-vimes wrote:
| I'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way
| to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles -
| their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as
| they see it.
|
| The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that
| governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were
| stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to
| come up with such "innovations".
| miltonlost wrote:
| "Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used
| 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences
| around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I
| wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but
| rather sociopathic.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-
| for-15-na...
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-
| memph...
| oklahomasports wrote:
| Youve posted the same think like 4 times now
| trickyager wrote:
| I'm not sure if this matters. The illegality of the
| article's central premise seems like an important point
| excluded from the article.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Wartsila, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the
| same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters.
| It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
|
| This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it
| is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton
| cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to
| ridiculous levels.
| jsnell wrote:
| I mean, the claim is certainly nonsensical in the sense that
| this isn't something Wartsila just "realized". They have been
| in the power plant business for decades. In the oldest
| financials they have online (the annual report for year 2000)
| their power plant sales are larger than their marine engine
| sales.
|
| Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on
| Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so
| easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of
| pathological fabulists.
|
| But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you
| saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers
| are making a mistake?
| g8oz wrote:
| They likely use multiple engines.
| codingdave wrote:
| This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels
| to make more money."
|
| It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes
| no more sense with AI.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil
| fuels to make more money."
|
| Like every other industry in the world?
|
| I'm kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the
| political talking point for topics like water usage and energy
| use when they're just doing what every other energy-intensive
| industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the
| building materials that built your house also came from
| industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more
| money.
| roxolotl wrote:
| The difference is they are new. It's not rational but people
| on the whole generally are ok with the status quo of how the
| sausage is made largely because they don't really think about
| it. But new systems being spun up provide an entry point for
| a discussion. Ideally that discussion can then be widened and
| open up an opportunity for wider scale change. Or nothing
| happens and it all becomes the new status quo which most
| don't think about again.
| TSiege wrote:
| The difference is that the food industry at least feeds me
| and a house provides me shelter. The people in charge of
| building AI data centers intend to replace all labor in using
| my own and leave me begging for peanuts, while also making
| energy and many goods more expensive and ruining the
| environment
| TSiege wrote:
| FYI Fairly certain this account is a bot. Acct created in
| 2023 and has 36k karma
| AkelaA wrote:
| We need food and housing. We don't need AI.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| More like it's a really long way to say the government has
| utterly failed at making sure electricity generation and
| transmission capacity keeps up with demand so datacenters have
| been forced to get creative with alternative ways to power
| themselves. These companies absolutely want to use renewable
| energy from the power grid but the government blew it.
| teknopaul wrote:
| Economic * need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid.
|
| *greed.
|
| We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is
| anything but a distribution of income problem.
| biddit wrote:
| The dialog around AI resource use is frustratingly inane, because
| the benefits are never discussed in the same context.
|
| LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing
| perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology
| humanity has created:
|
| > AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human
| individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks.
| Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500
| times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human
| writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900
| times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
|
| Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
| zzzeek wrote:
| > However, AI infrastructure cannot wait for the grid's multiyear
| transmission upgrades. An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12
| billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Getting a 400 MW
| datacenter online even six months earlier is worth billions.
| Economic need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid.
| The industry is already searching for new solutions.
|
| wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of
| extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans
| need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs"
| "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a
| ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever
| economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're
| not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US
| right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with
| that.
|
| This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like
| this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their
| cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally
| as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We
| really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
| geetee wrote:
| Title should be "AI labs are raping the planet"
| a1371 wrote:
| The problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that
| has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas
| cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out
| if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not
| going to be flexible enough to take new demand.
|
| It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived
| in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility
| commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result
| of it
| symbogra wrote:
| Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very
| interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are
| actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25
| years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.
|
| I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting
| jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with
| the data center on one side of a state border and the power
| generation on the other.
| qchris wrote:
| I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this
| article that are shockingly under-researched and completely
| missing critical parts of the narrative.
|
| > Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry
| by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple
| innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy
| strategy was the most impressive.
|
| > Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab
| even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the
| border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit
| early!
|
| The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly
| illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a
| tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably
| increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these
| communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly
| irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't
| appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the
| fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for
| these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out
| timelines and increasing cost.
|
| [1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
|
| [2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-
| xai-...
|
| [3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-
| lawsuit...
| mikelitoris wrote:
| More appropriate word is "sly" not "clever".
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| It's called "Semi" analysis for a reason. Dylan Patel is the
| Jim Cramer of industry reporting for this sector.
| roxolotl wrote:
| It's cute they describe this as a solution to _the_ power
| problem. It's a solution to _their_ power problem. We have a grid
| problem. This massive amount of investment would be an incredible
| time to do something about it. Instead we've got an
| administration hostile to modern energy solutions and an industry
| hostile to everyone. Really depressing to see all this money go
| up in smoke in such a massive short sighted rush.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| TLDR: They're not reducing power consumption, they're just also
| using gas now. Buckle up for higher prices, the AI slop factory
| needs more power.
| bespokedevelopr wrote:
| I previously worked directly for some of the power generation
| manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power
| transmission side.
|
| My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on
| the power generation industry.
|
| I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article
| though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old
| contacts to see if there's any opportunities with building models
| and analytics for the new demands.
|
| Focusing on Bloom is fun because they're new and startup vibes
| but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with
| their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler
| than gas turbines. I'm sure the heads at GE wish they hadn't sold
| that off now.
|
| On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are
| more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember
| this is an old industry with existing supply chains and
| maintenance companies.
|
| As long as the demand for new data centers doesn't lose steam
| these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access
| builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the
| system to be "fast", only 5-6 years for build outs now. They're
| also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on
| here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously
| now. There's so many requests from companies arbing who can give
| them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you
| even want a call back.
| trhway wrote:
| so we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end -
| residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end
| - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high
| efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into
| the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it
| from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and
| may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago).
| That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be
| a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration
| wave.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Isn't spinning up huge amounts of power on inefficient engines
| going to make climate impacts worse?
| g8oz wrote:
| >>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite,
| using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.
|
| These generators polluted the nearby historically black
| neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides.
| Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly,
| children and those suffering from conditions like COPD
| particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are
| pending.
|
| xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this
| episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be
| compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream:
| Jobs! Investment!
|
| https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
| mhb wrote:
| Why is the skin tone of the residents of the affected community
| relevant?
| ladidahh wrote:
| In the US, we have a living history of discriminatory
| policies based on race
|
| https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-
| shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis
| mhb wrote:
| Yeah. I've heard about it. So this wouldn't be a problem if
| it affected a different group of people?
| butlike wrote:
| Probably not because if it affected white neighborhoods,
| it either wouldn't be enacted, shut down after
| complaints, or receive enough bad press as to be shut
| down.
| mhb wrote:
| That's a lot of assumptions. If they wanted that to be
| the point of the article they could have done it a lot
| more explicitly.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Because the people who decided where to locate it and the
| people in government who could do something to stop it make
| decisions about how much they care based on those folks' skin
| color. If those generators were placed near a rich white
| neighborhood, the government response would be wildly
| different.
|
| Mississippi in particular is well known at the state
| government level to actively choose not to enforce
| environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens
| live.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| And TFA addresses this. South Memphis was a community
| largely composed of freed slaves, where manufacturers set
| up shop, the military dumped waste (now a superfund site),
| and people have continued to mark the area for polluting
| industries for generations.
| jordanb wrote:
| To be fair they would definitely do this to rural and/or
| poor white people too.
| kube-system wrote:
| Maybe. East Palestine OH got a decent amount of political
| attention.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make
| these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about
| natural gas.
|
| My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water
| to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've
| never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2
| which is a global and not local issue).
|
| Every building here (except for those connected to district
| heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or
| furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity
| within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what
| concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other
| hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in
| operation.
| butlike wrote:
| Global issues start locally. See: tragedy of the commons
| trhway wrote:
| >I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators
| make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same
| about natural gas.
|
| it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not
| about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too,
| while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for
| "simple" LNG burners/heaters.
|
| What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines
| dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is
| like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7
| near your house.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air:
| https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-
| air-p...
|
| Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but
| the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI
| datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren't inspected
| or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate
| agent involved, I'd be surprised if any care at all were
| being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these
| portable generators.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| That is true of gas stoves, but gas furnaces don't exhaust
| into the house.
| kube-system wrote:
| Lower efficiency gas furnaces don't have a completely
| sealed exhaust and rely on a draft for pollutant
| evacuation. This usually works good enough when properly
| installed and maintained but can be a source of indoor
| air pollution. Although typically minimal.
|
| And there are also decorative and/or supplemental gas
| heating devices which exhaust into the home.
| jordanb wrote:
| Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be
| breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run
| dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was
| that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of
| them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time,
| which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government
| of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.
|
| You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs
| frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future
| of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter"
| power generation. Understand that this is what it is:
| generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of
| "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-
| demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near
| you.
| osigurdson wrote:
| They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today
| to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions
| can be very low if done correctly.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale
| natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was
| there for what, a decade already? And before it, there was a
| coal plant there too.
|
| Basically, it looks like the usual FUD by the usual agenda
| pushers.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| We can sue to shut down pollution generators? Finally, I can
| get rid of that annoying airport...
| mucle6 wrote:
| The phrasing 'historically black neighborhoods' feels like it
| pushes a specific agenda rather than just addressing the
| pollution.
|
| It implies that if this were happening near a non black
| neighborhood, it wouldn't be as egregious, which is a strange
| moral stance.
|
| Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people
| living there now.
| lawn wrote:
| > It implies that if this were happening near a non black
| neighborhood, it wouldn't be as egregious, which is a strange
| moral stance.
|
| I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a
| white neighborhood.
| mucle6 wrote:
| That makes sense. For some reason though I still sense a
| hint of desire for retribution in the original comment
| SantalBlush wrote:
| I think this is an uncharitable interpretation.
| mucle6 wrote:
| My interpretation is it would be less likely to happen
| near a wealthy neighborhood compared to a poor
| neighborhood. Why talk about race if its not about race?
| marci wrote:
| It makes more sense to word it like this when you take
| into consideration historical trends, like drowned towns
| for lakes or dams, highway system along redline, thriving
| neighbourhoods erased to create parks... often preceded
| by violence and little to no compensation.
| guhidalg wrote:
| The phrase implies that powerful companies know that
| historically black neighborhoods don't have the resources to
| mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data
| center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the
| pollution near historically black neighborhoods.
|
| The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs
| so that megacompanies don't have to spend more money to keep
| our environment clean.
| mucle6 wrote:
| You're conflating race with poverty.
|
| It feels racist to expect people to assume a neighborhood
| is 'resource poor' just because it is 'historically black'.
|
| Also, the OP explicitly states that lawsuits are pending.
| Clearly, the community was able to mount a legal defense
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| > It feels racist to expect people to assume a
| neighborhood is 'resource poor' just because it is
| 'historically black'.
|
| Statistically poverty is correlated with race. For
| reasons to do with (quite recent) history.
| mucle6 wrote:
| Statistics are not a license to assume.
|
| Crime rates also statistically correlate with
| demographics, but if I assume a specific person is a
| criminal based on that stat, I would (rightly) be called
| racist.
|
| Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor'
| similarly feels racist.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Statistically crime is also related with race. Are we
| ready to make similar assumptions then?
| sidereal1 wrote:
| Crime is related with poverty which is related with race.
| thisgetsit wrote:
| > xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think
| this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be
| compromised by private sector so easily just because they
| scream: Jobs! Investment!
|
| 80ish% in the US live <100 miles from their hometown.
|
| It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more
| than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work
| to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope
| it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."
|
| Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of
| people.
|
| https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/generations/millennials-...
|
| So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As
| long as human biology exists humans will solve for those
| problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes,
| ethno objects that come and go with the generations.
|
| Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture
| sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That
| they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive
| should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to
| the living.
|
| Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously
| took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.
| renewiltord wrote:
| To be honest, as soon as someone starts talking about
| "historically black" this and that I'm sure they're pulling a
| bullshit job just like the "critically endangered" snail-
| darters and the "historical" laundromats of San Francisco.
| casey2 wrote:
| TFA said it's all legal and explicit federal policy. You don't
| have to like it, but some people are going to have to make
| minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services. Look on the
| bright side, when these people all have personal robot doctors
| caring for them well into their 100s they will be grateful they
| didn't listen to the NIMBYs
| twerka-stonk wrote:
| I enjoyed the detailed article despite how depressing it is. I
| never can blame business for finding a market-palatable solution.
|
| However, it is worth saying that xAI's "solution" was illegal,
| unhealthy for the local constituents, and stinks of corruption,
| https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da....
| AkelaA wrote:
| I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they
| mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess
| that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI
| "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.
| cl0ckt0wer wrote:
| They are already power-constrained. Any efficiency improvements
| would immediately be allocated to more AI.
| redox99 wrote:
| If you make it more efficient, then you train it for longer or
| make it larger. You're not going to just idle your GPUs.
|
| And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's
| going to use your model if someone else has a better model.
| inkysigma wrote:
| What makes you think that the entire process isn't being made
| more efficient? There are entire papers dedicated to pulling
| out more FLOPs from GPUs so that less energy is being wasted on
| simply moving memory around. Of course, there's also inference
| side optimizations like speculative decoding and MoE. Some of
| these make the training process more expensive.
|
| The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale
| to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll
| eventually level this off though. If performance somehow
| plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up.
| That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near
| future.
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Kinda proving that these are a bad deal for communities - very
| few jobs and tax revenues, but enjoy the increased asthma and
| cancer we all get to pay for.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| TL;DR by saying fuck environment
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Does anyone know a really good source for basic information
| estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI
| training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we
| believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like
| to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-
| AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong
| reactions that tend to cloud the facts.
|
| Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that
| it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we
| must have at least a _rough_ estimate?
|
| Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)
| lefra wrote:
| US grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source:
| ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh
| (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI,
| I couldn't find.
|
| So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal
| point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of
| CO2 the US emits per year.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
|
| https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546
|
| For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about
| 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base
| scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon
| intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030.
| Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5%
| today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).
|
| https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
| seydor wrote:
| ... and, all this for what ?
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