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AWS 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 c
by throwaway81523 3y ago
AWS 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.