Comment by aforwardslash
8 hours ago
Sort of. Today the energy companies trade (obviously) energy; imagine if they traded compute power instead; the use case for never-seen industrial clients is being built as we speak, and companies are actually purchasing directly production companies to meet demand; the reason this happens is because production is somewhat scarce (scaling up a grid used to be a decades project, not a years one - ask China), and the traditional economics of scale is inverted - Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI; you don't have idle time like other industries. The big issue is obviously the scale - a hiccup that causes a dc to go dark from the grid (eg switching to ups+ generator) may cause such instability on the grid that it will shut down, as a safeguard
> Data centers are always power-hungry, specially with AI
I expect datacenter load has a similar sort of day to day demand curve as everything else. Consider for example global bandwidth use during work hours versus in the evening when people get home and pull up a streaming service.
Of course you can use more flexible tasks to demand shift but the same applies to the electric grid.