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Comment by cogman10

1 hour ago

Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

I get it, a lot of the older data centers consumed relatively little power. More than nothing but manageable like 1 or 2MW.

The reason for the "craze" is that the AI datacenters being built are monstrosities that consume way more power, an order of magnitude or more. And a lot of them are going up.

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cogman10

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T-A  1 hour ago

> Did your datacenter consume 9GW?

I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

https://www.enconnex.com/data-center-energy-consumption-and-...

https://techplustrends.com/1gw-data-center-power-consumption...

  • cogman10  1 hour ago

    > I think the largest data centers consume about 1 GW.

    The largest AI datacenters. And there are multiple planned that consume beyond 1 GW. In particular, I'm referring to the box elder county data center which I believe is one of the largest planned. [1]

    Prior to these AI datacenters, 100MW would have been considered an extremely large amount of power for a single datacenter.

    But also, 1GW is a huge amount of power. More than a lot of states use, and not the really small ones like Wyoming. Just for reference, steel mills use 40MW and there's about 8 of them in the US.

    1GW is an absurd amount of power to consume.

    [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...

    • LaurensBER  39 minutes ago

      > 1GW of power datacenters, more efficient GPUs, more efficient training, Xiaomi/Deepseek disk based caching + other efficiency gains.

      I haven't done the math but if I see how many tokens I can burn per month for 100 USD it's pretty mind boggling to imagine how much capacity is being added by this build out.

      This is not the place to discuss it but even in my wildest predictions I find it hard to imagine that we're really going to need all this capacity anytime soon (although I guess anything spare can go into training).

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