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AWS acquires Talen's 960MW nuclear data center campus in Pennsylvania
- blinded 3y agoI've swam out by this plan a few times. Its a popular boating spot.
- throwaway81523 3y agoAWS didn't acquire a nuclear reactor. THey bought a data center park that is sited next to an existing nuclear power station. It's interesting news but less crazy as the headline made it sound,
- throwaway2990 3y agoWas the headline in HM changed cos it says campus so it didn’t sound like they got a power plant…
- Dylan16807 3y agoYou don't think "960MW nuclear data center campus" sounds like the power plant is part of the campus? I do.
- throwaway2990 3y agoNo? It specified campus…
- Dylan16807 3y agoPlease explain your reasoning about the word campus. You seem to think it's obvious but I'm not seeing it. A campus is a group of buildings and land that are part of one institution. I've been in multiple campuses that have power plants (and where the primary purpose of the campus is not generating power). The idea of a datacenter campus that makes its own power is a reasonable one.
- throwaway2990 3y agoThey didn’t say they bought a power plant. They bought a campus next to the power plant. That implies that it’s not generating power. How you could be confused I don’t understand. I get that headlines are often misleading or sensationalised. But this one isn’t.
- Dylan16807 3y ago> They didn’t say they bought a power plant. They bought a campus next to the power plant. That implies that it’s not generating power. How you could be confused I don’t understand. I get that headlines are often misleading or sensationalised. But this one isn’t. The title doesn't say "next to". It says "960MW nuclear data center campus". What makes it "nuclear"? Well in this case it's because it's next to a nuclear power plant, but it would be just as valid to use that wording for a campus that contains a nuclear power plant. In fact I think the latter is more straightforward. And funnily enough if you look at the picture, it looks like it's one big campus too!
- Scoundreller 3y agoThat's gotta save a bundle on transmission and distribution charges. I wonder if industrial users get better deals on that, because my utility bills are mostly not for the gas/electricity generation.
- XorNot 3y agoConsistent power demand from a nuclear reactor is a much more cost-effective way for a reactor to run - I imagine a datacenter is a good client because they're basically optimized to sit at a consistent level of power consumption.
- steelbrain 3y ago> because they're basically optimized to sit at a consistent level of power consumption. Is that really so? I was under the impression that even data centers go through peak and bottom usage as do most online services.
- gottorf 3y agoYeah, I'd be curious about this, as well. A garden-variety 1U server sitting in a rack somewhere could be pulling 80W at idle and 1KW at load.
- XorNot 3y agoSure, any individual server: but amortized over 1000s? You'll develop an average just from traffic, and it'll be a lot higher then the bottom end - since otherwise why have the datacenter? Why not use spare capacity in your other datacenters? The trick is that you sign a contract with the utility to guarantee a particular type of usage - and utilities love people who burn Watt-hours rather then Volt-Amps (i.e. a power factor near 1) since they're a lot easier to service, and people who promise to use power fairly consistently. The utility says "we'll give you a lower overall rate, provided you promise to consume at least this much electricity" - in practice of course, you could consume less but you'll pay for it no matter what. But compute is great for this model: it's fast to move applications onto and off servers, so hitting that minimum is easy.
- mlfreeman 3y agoThe headline sounds a lot more supervillain-ish than the article. Probably done on purpose in pursuit of the almighty click.
- Dylan16807 3y agoWhat's supervillain-ish about a company owning a datacenter and adjacent power plant?
- TaylorAlexander 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Atom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Atom
- Dylan16807 3y agoIs the implication that nuclear power plants are inherently supervillainous? If amazon buys a power plant, my only thoughts about an increase in villainy from the status quo fall into the "monopoly" category.
- preisschild 3y agoNah But Dr. No had a pool type reactor :D
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoI mean, I take the comment about supervillains as mostly a joke, so I don’t really feel a need to strictly interrogate it for factual accuracy. But also I do think it fits. Looking at super villains, they’re usually just powerful people with slightly unusual property, who also happen to be evil. Lex Luthor’s company Lexcorp was an aerospace company. In the first Superman movie, Luthor was a pretty weird and relatively unremarkable guy. In the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies the super villain was just a guy with a global media company who created calamity and murder so that he could report on it first. Nuclear power and radiation have often been themes for comic book heroes and villains. I think it’s reasonable to read the (misleading) headline and think “oh great now Bezos owns a nuclear power plant, he’s going to become a super villain” as the sort of non-serious comment prevalent on the internet. People say the same about Musk all the time. I don’t think it’s meant to be taken literally.
- tibbydudeza 3y agoWell not so strange really. Blue Origin is owned by Bezos and NASA is looking at a nuclear fission propulsion system for a Mars mission :).
- ENGNR 3y agoThey have some pretty hefty minimum use and right to use options tied to the nuclear reactor though. And it says the intention is to consume 960MW, which a very quick search says is roughly equivalent to the entire output of a typical nuclear reactor.
- preisschild 3y agoThe NPP has 2x 1350 MWe boiling water reactors 960MWe is 71% of one of them.
- tutfbhuf 3y agoDoes anyone know how many NVIDIA data center GPUs can be run off 960MW?
- chx 3y agohttps://www.anandtech.com/show/16792/nvidia-unveils-pcie-version-of-80gb-a100-accelerator-pushing-pcie-to-300-watts https://www.anandtech.com/show/16792/nvidia-unveils-pcie-ver... The 80GB version runs 300W on PCIe and 400W on SXM4. (Which is my third reason to hate the current wave of "AI" bullshit, the first two being industry scale copyright violation and barely better than slave labor).
- kaliqt 3y agoStop complaining about usage, from crypto to AI, they all have relevant uses to push the world forward. Think about how to increase quality of life and output, the companies will automatically increase efficiency to increase profits and reduce costs.
- foofie 3y ago> Stop complaining about usage, from crypto to AI, they all have relevant uses to push the world forward. Can you elaborate on what you have in mind when you clam that crypto is "pushing the world forward"?
- starspangled 3y agoHow crazy does the headline make it sound? They're a book store that got into the online cloud business. They got into the chip design business. I don't know the industries to know whether it would make sense for them to buy power stations, but it doesn't sound outright crazy like Nike buying the Hoover Dam would.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoAnd a 10 year Power Purchasing Agreement with the nuclear plant. So they didn't buy it, they're just leasing half the output!
- throwaway118899 3y agoEvery article I’ve seen posted to HN about this topic has some cute or clickbait title to overhype the nuclear aspect.
- wmf 3y agoHello us-east-3.
- whalesalad 3y agous-sheetz-1
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bluish29 3y agoI think the title would be much better if it says "nuclear powered". The current one is slightly confusing.
- acidburnNSA 3y agoAgreed. I had to double take because I spent a lot of time worrying about nuclear data, which is all the probabilities of various nuclear reactions in certain situations. Like, the probability that a neutron moving at 2200 m/s will bounce off a Uranium-238 atom vs. the probability that it will be captured and emit a gamma ray is nuclear data. Heck, we even have a National Nuclear Data Center: https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/ https://www.nndc.bnl.gov/ This is going to get confusing.
- grow2grow 3y agoThey thought they were going to mine cryptocurrency here during off-peak hours, if anybody is wondering why an energy company casually owns a huge datacenter. edit: guilty of 1) not reading article first, and 2) being overly pessimistic about the cryptocurrency climate.
- covercash 3y ago> Talen’s Nautilus crypto data center is seemingly not part of the deal with Amazon. It sounds like they still have plans to mine crypto…
- jeffbee 3y agoIf this is a "nuclear data center" then by the same standards of logic Google's Iowa datacenter(s) are "coal data centers". https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1396769,-95.8301348,8221a,35y,359.28h,26.2t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1396769,-95.8301348,8221a,35...
- perihelions 3y agoCreepy that Google redacts its own properties from its own maps. At least the free world still has real maps, https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/41.1718/-95.8068&layers=Y https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/41.1718/-95.8068&layer... ("Google Data Center")
- dandanua 3y ago"If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" (c)
- jeffbee 3y agoI don't think it's "creepy". They're just not points of interest. They don't have a label for this Facebook data center, either. https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6649119,-93.5130914,1223m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@41.6649119,-93.5130914,1223m/da...
- perihelions 3y agoOf course it's a point of interest: there's hundreds of cars in that parking lot. They must have gone out of their way to suppress the map point—that's a reflection of their internal corporate culture, which is one of paranoia. Note the corn ethanol manufacturing plant next door was allowed to labelled, as was the coal power plant.
- nebula8804 3y agoMusk stated that he predicts that 2023 going into 2024 will have a shortage of transformers and that based on the rate of improvement of AI that there will be a shortage of electricity in 2025. Maybe these are moves by tech companies trying to preempt what might be coming?
- bamboozled 3y agoIf this is true, it's ridiculous. Climate change couldn't get much worse, yet here we are.
- lmm 3y agoMoving our electricity consumption onto nuclear is quite possibly the single best thing we can do to combat climate change.
- greenavocado 3y agoNot enough capacity and not enough plans to bring more online. It is difficult for data center customers to expand in Northern Virginia because Dominion is struggling to deliver enough electricity given the limitations of the current infrastructure.
- fy20 3y agoIf the datacenter is literally right nice to the power station, it seems that capacity of the power grid isn't going to be an issue?
- mcapodici 3y agoYou need to just go back 20 years, and build that power station.
- preisschild 3y agoNew builds will appear, since there is a lot of demand
- plorg 3y agoI think we nuclear energy should play a big part in decarbonizing our energy infrastructure, but this is doing nothing of the sort. This is ostensibly 1GW of new projected demand without any new generation being built for it. Meaning, at best this is creating new demand that will have to be sourced elsewhere - this is a nuclear station that has been operating for 40 years. It's good for it to stay online, but they would not have a hard time selling that electricity. This really just seems like a crabs in a bucket capitalist move - laying claim to existing resources before they become scarce and expensive.
- dgacmu 3y agoThat's not really "at best" - at best, this represents a mix of new demand plus some compute being moved from customers' on-prem / small and inefficient datacenters. I'm not sure how much of AWS's growth is "new compute" vs "moved compute", but for the part that's moved, it's not necessarily a bad thing for it to move to a datacenter with a low PUE (power utilization effectiveness - overhead such as cooling/backup power/power supply inefficiency) that uses green power. (AWS/Google/Microsoft's datacenters are a _lot_ more efficient on a per-compute basis than the typical small corporate datacenter; like 30+% lower power waste because of inefficient AC and power distribution design.)
- yeknoda 3y agodo not underestimate the magnitude of this news. it reveals there is basically negligible opposition to existing nuclear and limited or no opposition to new nuclear other than for cost reasons.
- codeonline 3y agoNo, it does not.
- greenavocado 3y agoWhat was on that site before? What was running there? Who were the prior customers?
- UberFly 3y agoThe linked title article might provide clues.
- panqueca 3y agoAwsGPT is coming
- pwarner 3y agoI think this has to be it. Not us East 3, but AI only data center
- xyst 3y agoThere is going to come a point where all network traffic will at least go through 1 or more AWS data center. Amazon will be the literal gatekeeper of network traffic. This is fucking scary to me.
- 39 3y agoMaybe there is a market for alternatives.
- tenacious_tuna 3y agothis is roughly the plot of Charles Stross's "Unwirer" short story, written in collaboration with Cory Doctrow, I think. https://craphound.com/unwirer/ https://craphound.com/unwirer/
- badcarbine 3y ago[dead]
- johnduhart 3y agoDoes AWS need to build anything on the site as part of this deal, or are they simply leveraging the power added to the grid in their existing us-east-1 footprint? The distance from Ashburn is too far for this to be an extension of a region.
- rswail 3y agoInteresting if this becomes an AWS "region", because I would have thought that independent power supplies for the different AZs are part of the promise of what an AWS region/AZ is about. But if the data center(s) are all getting power from one source, that's a SPOF.
- londons_explore 3y agoI'm sure the site also has power lines out to the rest of the grid.
- H8crilA 3y agoSo much for savings on power lines cost (but at least there are savings on power line power losses).
- easton 3y agoThey say (you can kind of prove it but not really because they don't officially list locations) that AZs are supposed to be on different flood planes and stuff so that the chances of an entire region failure due to a natural disaster are minimized. I think that means that the other AZs probably wouldn't be really close to the power station like this one. (they could run lines I guess)
- aaronbrethorst 3y agoCheck out this recent episode of the Volts podcast with guest Jigar Shah, head the DOE's Programs Loan Office, where David Roberts and Jigar go into quite a bit of detail about the energy needs of data centers over the coming decades, and why nuclear is going to be a necessary component of any CO2-free energy solution. https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps
- joshbaptiste 3y agohaven't heard of this podcast before.. great listen
- jmorenoamor 3y agoIt's like playing Factorio but in real world.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]