zlacker

>>Dyslex+(OP)
It's unfortunate that no math is ever done in these stories.

If you take the "350,000" H100s that Facebook wants by EOY, each of those can do 700W, which gives you almost 250 MW for just the GPUs. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that a single large power plant is measured in Gigawatts. All of Google's data centers combined are O(10 GW) which are matched with renewable power offsets [1].

Importantly, the world installed >500 Gigawatts of renewable energy in 2023 [2], mostly driven by PV Solar in China. The amount of potential solar and wind and other renewable-ish (hydro) outstrips even a 10x'ing of a lot of these numbers. But even for a single site, dams like Three Gorges are >20 GW.

There are real efficiency and scale challenges in doing AI in a single, large site. But existing power generation systems deliver plenty of power.

[1] https://www.gstatic.com/gumdrop/sustainability/google-2023-e...

[2] https://www.iea.org/reports/renewables-2023/executive-summar...

>>boulos+nm
Definitely the right way to look at things.

> If you take the "350,000" H100s that Facebook wants by EOY, each of those can do 700W

Plus ~500W for cooling

>>xnx+Gr
Less than a 1:1 ratio here is an extremely efficient datacenter. The heat has to get out of the building, not just off the chip.

>>pclmul+Nz
Oh, wow. I didn't know it was that bad. Google advertises a PUE of 1.1: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/

>>xnx+wD
Just to clarify, PUE of 1.1 means 10% power waste not spent on computing. However, Google datacenters are extremely efficient, and they design everything end-to-end for efficiency. A normal datacenter with less efficient cooling, less efficient power delivery, less efficient buildings, etc. easily adds up to a lot more wasted power.