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Comment by barnabee | Hacker News Reader

This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.

If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).

Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.

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Make all DCs provide their own power and suddenly they’d be large amounts of solar and battery in cheap scrubland

A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.

Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.

I'm actually fine with only having access to the AI shaitan when the sun is shining over the datacenter.

That triples the cost of the data centre per unit of compute.

that could still be cheaper than actually sucking CO2 out of the air --- or not, let the market do it's thing

A self sufficney solar, battery, data centre is about 70% cost on the data centre and 10% on the battery.

Okay and not exploding makes РБМК reactor 70% more expensive (maybe), but we kinda want it to not explode, I guess?

I understand that singling out datacenters specifically isn't really fair, but if they start accounting for 25% of the grid, then I have to pay for everybody's dancing JD Vance gifs even I don't look at them, at which point the line between communism and free market gets a bit blurry to me.

Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.

The need for memes knows no bounds. In short order the majority of power usage worldwide will be for compute and newer generations will wonder how it took so long.

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