4 ms·

Meta data center electricity consumption hits 14,975GWh

76 points by belter 2y ago

supportengineer 2y ago
Imagine if we used all of our resources for humanitarian purposes
- bigyikes 2y ago
  Imagine if we used all of our resources to develop artificial general intelligence which could multiply our prosperity and solve problems across many domains… …or we could allocate it against economic gradients, to things which don’t actually maximize net impact but instead allow us to feel good
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Better yet, we could develop an artificial general intelligence that achieves consciousness, and decides we're a toxic infestation of the planet, and works to wipe us out. The AI wouldn't even be wrong in its assessment of us.
  - akomtu 2y ago
    Right now those who have power to develop AI aren't in a hurry to do good for the humanity. They'd rather destroy it if it makes their profits grow. So a more likely future is a corporation like Meta Facebook creates a real AI, asks it how to increase profits and the AI finds a way: a horrible, disgusting way, but a way that works. Other corporations follow and we enter the era of AI dystopia. The second most likely future is humanity creates a commonwealth AI, under the rule of United Nations or similar organisation, and immediately asks the AI: how can we make humanity better? And AI finds a solution based on a crooked understanding of what we need. So it creates a dead-end utopia where humanity slowly degrades in total comfort.
- iamgopal 2y ago
  In that case We don't have enough work to do. Automating agriculture and distributing produce for free ( or at low margin ) is the last nail in to the coffin. This all is just dopamine, real work needs bombastic goals.
  - candiddevmike 2y ago
    So turn off the lights and give the planet a respite.
  - kelseyfrog 2y ago
    Automating agriculture is a current trend, but there's so many components that it's hard to say when such a project would be considered "completed".
  - hedora 2y ago
    Hunger is a political problem at this point. We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations. De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture. Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58282 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery... Driving farm jobs from 1.2% to 0% isn’t going to move food costs or availability very much, and it’d barely be perceptible to the economy at large.
    - Aerroon 2y ago
      It's not a political problem if somebody actually has to do the physical work of growing the crops and harvesting them. Somebody has to do them and that somebody wants to get paid for it. If you could remove the somebody from the chain then the entire cost to produce food at that point would be "fiction", ie it would be possible to make it free. But as long as human labor is involved in the production it cannot be free.
- nvch 2y ago
  Including providing free social networking for everyone on the whole planet? (Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)
  - pluto_modadic 2y ago
    on facebook you are the product, though. If facebook were mastodon, and also didn't have ads, maybe.
  - thrance 2y ago
    If anything, this planet would be a better place if we could get rid of Facebook.
    - neverartful 2y ago
      Wouldn't the bulk of the activity just find somewhere else to do mostly the same stuff they were doing on Facebook?
  - timeon 2y ago
    The polarization of society may show that social media are net negative.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    Ah yes, the famous "everything new is progress and progress is good". I wish I had such simple views on the world
  - yread 2y ago
    I think that the vast majority of the power usage is actually spent on crunching the data for advertisers so a social network with no need for monetization could be a lot more energy efficient
  - yccs27 2y ago
    The better part of Facebook's network traffic is there to serve ads. A utilitarian social network (similar to this site) would probably only use a fraction of the resources.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- yodelshady 2y ago
  People use facebook of their own free will. Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents? Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you. I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    > People use facebook of their own free will. 75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost > maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Facebook has literal psychology experts on staff to make the platform as addictive as possible. Treating it as matter of willpower is uneducated and naive.
- t0bia_s 2y ago
  You mean "artifiacly preserve life on places that would naturally vanish beacuse of unhabitable conditions for it"?
rmah 2y ago
14,975,435MWh for one year (8760 hrs) = 1709 MW load. Or about 1.7 mil servers using 1kW each (total, including its share of data center cooling). That's a lotta servers. Another way to look at it.. they say they have about 3.14 bil daily active users across all platforms. So that's about 13Wh per daily user session. At $0.15/kWh, that's about $0.002 of electricity which doesn't seem that horrible.
- fifilura 2y ago
  It also corresponds to 2-3 nuclear reactors. I am also not shocked. But somewhat surprised by the choice of unit in the article.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    What is the output of the three reactors worth of electricity? Hot takes and shit posts ?
    - manvillej 2y ago
      the newest 4 nuclear reactors in the USA produce 4500 megawatt hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... these are newer and more efficient. so they are likely producing more than the average reactor. So its closer to 1.25 reactors worth of electricity. but data centers are a HUGE driver of electricity consumption.
      - fifilura 2y ago
        Whenever there is a post about nuclear it is always about the latest and greatest. Or in the future - "how many SMRs is that?". I should call it the law-of-something. I feel reasonably comfortable with the estimated 2-3 reactors. I could have said 1-4 but... (there are lots of reactors around 4-500MW too)
        SECProto 2y ago
tills13 2y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot where here in BC we just finished a new dam which could benefit 1.7m EV owners, 250k households........ Or the LNG plant just down the road. At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. I get that the plant will positively impact GDP but how much? And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? It's such a common trope "we don't have enough power to meet our climate goals" well yeah especially when it's being used to support carbonized resource processing.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong. >And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - 486sx33 2y ago
    Because, socialism ! We can’t get private business to invest in infrastructure in Canada, because like Venezuela, we might just take it over and socialize it. Like the pipeline Canada now owns and might give to the natives… lol So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  > And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils). So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.
switch007 2y ago
Is data center electricity usage making electricity cheaper or more expensive for the domestic user? Or neither
- paganel 2y ago
  By the law of economics it makes it more expensive because now the 75-years old pensioner has to compete on the free market against the likes of Meta, Amazon or Alphabet for access to the same money-exchanged finite resources (electric power, in this case). More demand generates a bigger price. Of course that these big corporations and their fans/share-owners will come up and say that said bigger demand is more than offset by the bigger offer being made available only because of said big corporations, but that’s just bs.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Electric power is not a finite resource though, so classical supply and demand would say the cost goes down - because Meta needs more power, people build more power stations, the power station builders (solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) sell more so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down.
    - paganel 2y ago
      > Electric power is not a finite resource though Electric power is most definitely a finite resource, otherwise we wouldn't have had this conversation and we would have all lived in a Startrek-like utopia. > so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down. That is the bs I was calling out against. I'm saying that because Meta needs more power then Meta will pay whatever will need in order to get access to that power, in effect out-competing those domestic users. Those power stations and the like would have already been built absent Meta's needs in order to server those domestic users and existing industrial users, you're saying that the incoming Meta new demand would be offset by the new offer (new power stations) generated by said new demand which is, again, the bs I was calling out against.
wiz21c 2y ago
FTA: > However, water withdrawal from groundwater increased 137 percent to 88 megaliters. Water withdrawals from areas with high or extremely high baseline water stress increased 20 percent to 1,360 megaliters. IOW, Meta just doesn't care about people around its server farms. > Electricity intensity per monthly active person also grew to 0.0041MWh, up 32 percent. Means that Meta doesn't read the IPCC report telling us to decrease our consumption (I certainly doubt that FB users have increased their usage time by 32%).
naming_the_user 2y ago
My first instinct was to say that this isn't much, but actually, it's not insignificant. Say there's a billion users. 14975GWh implies then that each user has used 14975Wh or 15kWh. Per year. Fairly spicy I think. It's about the equivalent of a full charge of a laptop once per two days, so it's at least as much as many (most?) end users would consume "by themselves".
AStonesThrow 2y ago
I read the headline "metadata center" and envisioned a facility that only stores timestamps, call logs, and inode pointers

76 points by belter 2y ago

supportengineer 2y ago

Imagine if we used all of our resources for humanitarian purposes

bigyikes 2y ago
Imagine if we used all of our resources to develop artificial general intelligence which could multiply our prosperity and solve problems across many domains… …or we could allocate it against economic gradients, to things which don’t actually maximize net impact but instead allow us to feel good
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Better yet, we could develop an artificial general intelligence that achieves consciousness, and decides we're a toxic infestation of the planet, and works to wipe us out. The AI wouldn't even be wrong in its assessment of us.
- akomtu 2y ago
  Right now those who have power to develop AI aren't in a hurry to do good for the humanity. They'd rather destroy it if it makes their profits grow. So a more likely future is a corporation like Meta Facebook creates a real AI, asks it how to increase profits and the AI finds a way: a horrible, disgusting way, but a way that works. Other corporations follow and we enter the era of AI dystopia. The second most likely future is humanity creates a commonwealth AI, under the rule of United Nations or similar organisation, and immediately asks the AI: how can we make humanity better? And AI finds a solution based on a crooked understanding of what we need. So it creates a dead-end utopia where humanity slowly degrades in total comfort.
iamgopal 2y ago
In that case We don't have enough work to do. Automating agriculture and distributing produce for free ( or at low margin ) is the last nail in to the coffin. This all is just dopamine, real work needs bombastic goals.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  So turn off the lights and give the planet a respite.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  Automating agriculture is a current trend, but there's so many components that it's hard to say when such a project would be considered "completed".
- hedora 2y ago
  Hunger is a political problem at this point. We destroy more than enough food to end world hunger, but actually distributing that food to the people that need it would undermine the authority of lots of well-armed organizations. De-weaponizing food distribution would do a heck of a lot more than further reducing the percentage of the population that works in agriculture. Put another way, 10% of the US works in agriculture-related fields (including restaurants, food processing and textile manufacturing), but only 1.2% works on farms: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58282 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery... Driving farm jobs from 1.2% to 0% isn’t going to move food costs or availability very much, and it’d barely be perceptible to the economy at large.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    It's not a political problem if somebody actually has to do the physical work of growing the crops and harvesting them. Somebody has to do them and that somebody wants to get paid for it. If you could remove the somebody from the chain then the entire cost to produce food at that point would be "fiction", ie it would be possible to make it free. But as long as human labor is involved in the production it cannot be free.
nvch 2y ago
Including providing free social networking for everyone on the whole planet? (Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)
- pluto_modadic 2y ago
  on facebook you are the product, though. If facebook were mastodon, and also didn't have ads, maybe.
- thrance 2y ago
  If anything, this planet would be a better place if we could get rid of Facebook.
  - neverartful 2y ago
    Wouldn't the bulk of the activity just find somewhere else to do mostly the same stuff they were doing on Facebook?
- timeon 2y ago
  The polarization of society may show that social media are net negative.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Ah yes, the famous "everything new is progress and progress is good". I wish I had such simple views on the world
- yread 2y ago
  I think that the vast majority of the power usage is actually spent on crunching the data for advertisers so a social network with no need for monetization could be a lot more energy efficient
- yccs27 2y ago
  The better part of Facebook's network traffic is there to serve ads. A utilitarian social network (similar to this site) would probably only use a fraction of the resources.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yodelshady 2y ago
People use facebook of their own free will. Assuming they're at least a good a judge of what makes them happy as you are, how is this resource not being used for whatever "humanitarian" purposes are? Or are we only allowed resources as far as FEMA tents? Sure, maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy, but I put it to you the burden of proof for that's on you. I'd further put it that the resources used for these data centers, like Meta engineers, would in fact be pretty bloody useless at solving Sudanese famine, even if by some miracle they're actually good at the farming part, so can we please drop this weird argument that the cost of these things is automatically an opportunity cost in humanitarian purposes? Because it isn't.
- lm28469 2y ago
  > People use facebook of their own free will. 75% of the west is obese/overweight thanks to their own free will too. Because A: free will doesn't exist and B: the top mind of the world are all paid $$$ by companies to make sure you consume their shit no matter the social/health cost > maybe they're wrong about what makes them happy Is that all there is to life ? Then high fructose corn syrup must be paradise
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
  Facebook has literal psychology experts on staff to make the platform as addictive as possible. Treating it as matter of willpower is uneducated and naive.
t0bia_s 2y ago
You mean "artifiacly preserve life on places that would naturally vanish beacuse of unhabitable conditions for it"?

rmah 2y ago

14,975,435MWh for one year (8760 hrs) = 1709 MW load. Or about 1.7 mil servers using 1kW each (total, including its share of data center cooling). That's a lotta servers. Another way to look at it.. they say they have about 3.14 bil daily active users across all platforms. So that's about 13Wh per daily user session. At $0.15/kWh, that's about $0.002 of electricity which doesn't seem that horrible.

fifilura 2y ago
It also corresponds to 2-3 nuclear reactors. I am also not shocked. But somewhat surprised by the choice of unit in the article.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  What is the output of the three reactors worth of electricity? Hot takes and shit posts ?
  - manvillej 2y ago
    the newest 4 nuclear reactors in the USA produce 4500 megawatt hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla... these are newer and more efficient. so they are likely producing more than the average reactor. So its closer to 1.25 reactors worth of electricity. but data centers are a HUGE driver of electricity consumption.
    - fifilura 2y ago
      Whenever there is a post about nuclear it is always about the latest and greatest. Or in the future - "how many SMRs is that?". I should call it the law-of-something. I feel reasonably comfortable with the estimated 2-3 reactors. I could have said 1-4 but... (there are lots of reactors around 4-500MW too)
      - SECProto 2y ago

tills13 2y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot where here in BC we just finished a new dam which could benefit 1.7m EV owners, 250k households........ Or the LNG plant just down the road. At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. I get that the plant will positively impact GDP but how much? And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? It's such a common trope "we don't have enough power to meet our climate goals" well yeah especially when it's being used to support carbonized resource processing.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong. >And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 486sx33 2y ago
  Because, socialism ! We can’t get private business to invest in infrastructure in Canada, because like Venezuela, we might just take it over and socialize it. Like the pipeline Canada now owns and might give to the natives… lol So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
teruakohatu 2y ago
> And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils). So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.

switch007 2y ago

Is data center electricity usage making electricity cheaper or more expensive for the domestic user? Or neither

paganel 2y ago
By the law of economics it makes it more expensive because now the 75-years old pensioner has to compete on the free market against the likes of Meta, Amazon or Alphabet for access to the same money-exchanged finite resources (electric power, in this case). More demand generates a bigger price. Of course that these big corporations and their fans/share-owners will come up and say that said bigger demand is more than offset by the bigger offer being made available only because of said big corporations, but that’s just bs.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  Electric power is not a finite resource though, so classical supply and demand would say the cost goes down - because Meta needs more power, people build more power stations, the power station builders (solar, wind, nuclear, etc.) sell more so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down.
  - paganel 2y ago
    > Electric power is not a finite resource though Electric power is most definitely a finite resource, otherwise we wouldn't have had this conversation and we would have all lived in a Startrek-like utopia. > so they can benefit from economies of scale and they put their prices down. That is the bs I was calling out against. I'm saying that because Meta needs more power then Meta will pay whatever will need in order to get access to that power, in effect out-competing those domestic users. Those power stations and the like would have already been built absent Meta's needs in order to server those domestic users and existing industrial users, you're saying that the incoming Meta new demand would be offset by the new offer (new power stations) generated by said new demand which is, again, the bs I was calling out against.

wiz21c 2y ago

FTA: > However, water withdrawal from groundwater increased 137 percent to 88 megaliters. Water withdrawals from areas with high or extremely high baseline water stress increased 20 percent to 1,360 megaliters. IOW, Meta just doesn't care about people around its server farms. > Electricity intensity per monthly active person also grew to 0.0041MWh, up 32 percent. Means that Meta doesn't read the IPCC report telling us to decrease our consumption (I certainly doubt that FB users have increased their usage time by 32%).

naming_the_user 2y ago

My first instinct was to say that this isn't much, but actually, it's not insignificant. Say there's a billion users. 14975GWh implies then that each user has used 14975Wh or 15kWh. Per year. Fairly spicy I think. It's about the equivalent of a full charge of a laptop once per two days, so it's at least as much as many (most?) end users would consume "by themselves".

AStonesThrow 2y ago

I read the headline "metadata center" and envisioned a facility that only stores timestamps, call logs, and inode pointers