Comment by kulahan
10 hours ago
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
10 hours ago
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.
Germany doesn't need to participate in the next. They need to participate in something though. They are too small to do everything alone. Even the US depends on a lot of other countries to make things work.
If we’re looking at the car and energy industries, I think China has already won.
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
Heh, it was bought by BMW in ‘94.
Sure, talk to your grid operators about that! :)
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
I was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant.
My baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
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Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
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Not with a tech that needs 15 years to be build
If AI server farm operators conclude that nuclear is the way to go, they should be free to do so, yes. If they manage to fulfill all regulatory requirements. (Which means it'll be at least $2 per kWh, yay.)
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
Cool, your country fell way behind every other developed nation in this and you've missed out on a huge industry. In the end, your citizens will still use the products, they'll just probably end up having to pay more for the same functionality.
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
The already use it and are not impressed.
AI wears out quickly if you have special demands.
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
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A country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise.
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
> who knows what demands AI will have at that point
This is true for any investment pretty much.
This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
There's a new kind of "drill baby drill" which we should be embracing: geothermal energy. There's a lot of advancements in that space and it is a perfect base load generation source.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
Geothermal is, imo, the only true competitor to nuclear. It's great at providing cheap, consistent, clean energy. Nuclear is really only needed for baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes.
> baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes
That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
If demand spikes nuclear power plants aren’t fast enough
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I willing to wager that the AI bubble will burst before you could even begin to build power plants for them.
I'm sure the bubble will burst. However we have already found a few uses for AI and those uses will continue after the burst (if they are economical)
The wait until after the AI bubble and buy the cheap surplus of energy.
AI is useful but nit as useful as the AI companied claim it to be and the ROI isn’t as great neither.