16 ms·

'Three New York Cities' Worth of Power: AI Is Stressing the Grid

168 points by sbuttgereit 2y ago

jeffbee 2y ago
100 years ago was there this much bad-faith handwringing about all the new roads they needed?
- Cupertino95014 2y ago
  You could go on newspapers.com (free for 7 days) and look at those old papers. I know that the Transcontinental Railroad was intensely controversial. What's "bad-faith" about it?
  - qeternity 2y ago
    OP is saying the opposite: the TCR required huge investment, and was massively speculative, with a huge bubble ensuing. But rail travel did revolutionize the world, and few people sat around asking whether or not it was worth it.
    - Cupertino95014 2y ago
      TCR could have been justified by everyone having massive faith in the future, as OP is suggesting happened with roads. But you're quite wrong that "few people sat around asking whether or not it was worth it", as Iron Empires details: https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Empires-Robber-Railroads-America-ebook/dp/B07T1FT3D6/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Empires-Robber-Railroads-America... it was hugely controversial in Congress. I don't happen to know about roads, since that wasn't one single thing. But I doubt they happened because of blind faith in the future, either -- it was probably more businesses demanding roads NOW. So the argument that no one questioned them is dubious at best.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - qeternity 2y ago
        Sorry, you are correct. It was controversial. What I meant to say was that the AI bubble is feels different in that there seems to be relatively more skeptics versus railroad mania or the dot com bubble (but this could just be skewed by my own experiences). Whether or not this suggests a flawed value prop for AI is another story.
- quantified 2y ago
  What do mean by "they"? EDIT: who do you mean by "they"? (Rephrasing since some readers don't get that intent of the original question.) The handful of corporations interested in transport? Roads were a broad-based need. Roads have been built, used, maintained for thousands of years. The interstate highway system came from a government initiative, if there was a "they" it was broad-based enough to be "us". Railroads served needs that had existed for a long time and it was very clear what their use was from the time they were conceived, and there were more than a handful of participants in the movement of goods and people, since producers wanted greater reach and consumers wanted better access. By contrast to the very small number of "they" asking for more elecricity for data centers. How many people involved in the discussion are asking for the AI companies to be getting this juice?
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- raldi 2y ago
  Can you believe these “mammals”, burning energy around the clock to keep their blood warm all the time?
- kibwen 2y ago
  In the 60s there were, and they were right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt
- consteval 2y ago
  No, but there really should of been. We've largely been conned into accepting a highly un-scalable transportation infrastructure by the automobile and oil industry.
Spivak 2y ago
https://archive.ph/rS3ze https://archive.ph/rS3ze > American Electric Power, which owns the line, has proposed a new, higher electricity rate for data centers and cryptocurrency miners that would lock them in as customers for a decade. The companies are balking. Look at that! Net Neutrality comes to the electrical wire. They could have charged different rates based on industrial/residential or volume but that wouldn't be optimal rent extraction. This is actually a really great article about the weird contract dynamics of large power customers and the chicken-egg problem of needing commitment for a certain amount of guaranteed spend to justify the cost of servicing them. It has nothing at all to do about AI.
- XlA5vEKsMISoIln 2y ago
  Comparing this to net neutrality just poisons the well when discussing NN. Internet service providers being able to arbitrarily adjust pricing based on data source stifles competition. Is there competition in the power supply industry where a client can pick their source? Well, aside from having their own generation. In this case transfer is the service and if one day huge demand cluster disappears the capacity for it is left to rust.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    I don't think your point disagrees with mine. Charging based on demand is fine, requiring take-or-pay contracts when your request requires expensive grid upgrades is fine. Charging more because it's a datacenter as opposed to heavy industry, not fine. That's the part that mirrors NN. But to directly answer your question, yes there is competition. In most states, Ohio being one of them, you can choose who provides your power generation. And since companies are shopping states for where to build data centers AEP has a lot of competition for delivery.
motohagiography 2y ago
https://archive.is/rS3ze https://archive.is/rS3ze how is this stressing a grid that has to shed huge amounts of load to maintain availability off peak? instead of shedding the load, just price it effectively and the demand will even out and be a more efficient use of the fuel or generating station. the problem with our energy infra is a lack of consistent demand, and both AI and proof of work create the demand and a consumer of last resort that would make generation way more efficient. afaik, the main compute load is done in training, not in the queries. this article sounds like astroturfing a pretext for regulation under the auspices of "climate." also, the diminishing value of cash is accelerating so taking todays dollars and putting them into tomorrow's energy is probably the most fundamentally sound economic use of capital today. power generators were loaded with debt and used as public sector slush funds (in canada where they were nominally publicly owned) and now the companies are not very productive because they have to pass on the debt service cost to consumers, and prevent anyone from entering the market to offer competitive service that would interfere with that debt service. if you build new energy infra, you need to protect it from managers piling it with debt to loot it, but if you solve that real problem, demand is not a "problem," it's the most valuable thing in the universe.
parsimo2010 2y ago
There’s a saying I’ve heard that this reminded me of, “if you owe the bank two dollars, that’s your problem, but if you owe the bank two billion dollars, that’s the bank’s problem.” I think it’s relevant because it shows how responsibility shifts as things scale. If you owe the bank a little money then you are just a regular customer and you deal with the bank’s policies. But if you are a big player then it’s up to the bank to negotiate with you and come to mutually agreeable terms. These companies that have many big data centers are now big players. If they are stressing the grid they will need to be part of the solution in expanding the capacity and infrastructure, either by paying more to the electric companies or by including power infrastructure in their vertical integration. Microsoft has the right idea by investing in Three Mile Island, I think other big players will do similar things.
- boricj 2y ago
  Unlike banks, grids have an obvious solution to this problem: stop supplying these players with energy when the grid is at significant risk of a black out.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Are you suggesting it should be illegal for these players to buy energy on the open market?
    - kazen44 2y ago
      No, but we should have a discussion about if it is worth it to expense so much energy for something with very little hard, real use case. Al be it bitcoin or LLM's. there is a lot of money behind AI, but i have yet to see any of them actually get us a use case which work reliably. Not to mention, AI is fun and all, but that energy could be far better spend making the economy less reliant on fossil fuel.
      - voidfunc 2y ago
        > there is a lot of money behind AI, but i have yet to see any of them actually get us a use case which work reliably. Classic HN. You personally can't see the value of X therefore the entire market for X is wrong.
OutOfHere 2y ago
And it will go from 9% to 90% over the century. Big tech companies might as well avoid the middleman and evolve into the power generation business, although it's not hard with an open design of a solar farm in the desert.
- goda90 2y ago
  Unless we come up with newer more efficient algorithms and specialized hardware for implementing AI.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    glances at Bitcoin mining ASICs Any day, now.
    - jncfhnb 2y ago
      Bitcoin is definitionally inefficient to mine. That’s the whole point.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        The point is that difficulty is adjusted in accordance with network saturation to prevent a 51% attack. The network is not inherently inefficient unless you're attempting to monopolize it - you are still rewarded for using more efficient mining methods than your competitors. Which leads us to the GPUs. For a while everyone said ASICs (and the courageous ones, FPGAs) were the future of mining because they were inherently more efficient than GPU hardware could ever be. But it turns out that it's the other way around - mass-manufactured GPUs have access to more efficient silicon than any FPGA on the market could hope for. Similarly, AI chips that want to beat Nvidia on efficiency terms first have to climb a mountain of power usage that is inherent to their exponentially less-dense hardware.
        yitternet 2y ago
        I think it dpends on the PoW system used. On a basic level you have memory hardening, and that can be used to force usage of bulk memory on GPUs or bulk storage like with Chia. For the more complex PoW you can use speculative execution to make CPUs most performant like RandomX. With bitcoin its more arbitrary but you can see how they could hard-fork to a different hardware-favoring system if desired.
sapphicsnail 2y ago
Are these AI companies already profitable or is it speculation that's causing them to get a ton of funding? AI is such a polarizing subject and I find it difficult to sift through all the hype and hate surrounding it.
- Prbeek 2y ago
  They generated a whooping three billion dollars last year.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    But what was the cost of producing that revenue? At what point do they expect to break even on their investment? I can very quickly generate a lot of revenue if my investors will let me buy eggs at $0.50 each and resell them for $0.05, but I don't think I'd get any bites unless I could explain how that enterprise will eventually turn a profit.
    - Mistletoe 2y ago
      In 2021, SoftBank is very interested in your egg selling company.
      - stavros 2y ago
        After all, you can't make an omelet without breaking the bank on some eggs.
      - BoorishBears 2y ago
        If you can find a way to sell billions of dollars of eggs, even at a loss, people will invest. At scale you can increase the price of eggs, make the eggs cheaper, etc. Obviously the fact your eggs are artificially cheap is helping you sell them, but that won't be all there is to you as a seller. People underestimate how hard it is to sell things: you could have the cure to cancer in your hands today and still need to lose mllions to get anywhere with it.
    - 2y ago
idunnoman1222 2y ago
It is the first meaningful demand growth this century for the electricity industry How is this bad? Are the utilities just lazy?
- jsnell 2y ago
  But that's what the article is about. The utilities are being asked to make massive speculative investments in transmission infrastructure, but are dubious that the demand will actually be there when those projects finish in half a decade, and they'll be left holding the bag.
  - kazen44 2y ago
    Also, infrastructure investment has a very long return on investment. (power plants for instance need to run decades to make back their profits, especially nuclear power plants. Other forms of energy generation come and massive ecological costs. Are we really prepared to spend this much energy on a speculative technology? especially when it is destroying the planet while doing so?
    - whimsicalism 2y ago
      we should already be spending a ton on renewables and transmission capacity. this is a good way to ensure emissions become sustainable
    - radicality 2y ago
      “to make back their profits” - is electricity / energy generation usually all owned by for-profit companies and not at all by government/public? Is it any different in USA vs other countries? I feel that energy generation (key component if we want to grow as a species) should be helped/sponsored by governments and not really expected to turn any profit.
  - qeternity 2y ago
    This is why long term offtakes exist. The customer can prove their conviction and share in the risk. Extremely commonplace.
neonate 2y ago
https://archive.ph/rS3ze https://archive.ph/rS3ze
flanked-evergl 2y ago
The west needs to get over nimbyism and build infrastructure again. It's frankly embarrassing how much the west has crippled itself and then exported manufacturing to counties with much less regulation.
- wpm 2y ago
  It's an easy thought to have. I live in one of the US's larger metro areas in a leafy, former streetcar suburb then annexed, neighborhood. Near me, just down the street, is an old industrial plot that supplies materials and tools for other industrial uses. Their trucks are large. Their lots are small. Each day is a dance of large flatbeds loading up for the next day, moving in and out of the lots, and other customers and their large flatbeds coming to stock up. Many leave by driving down the street in front of my house. Is it annoying? Yes. Their trucks are heavy enough to shake the house when they go over a bump. They are loud as hell too. [1] Do I want to shut the company down? Of course not. They are my neighbors, for better or for worse. I have to try to make the relationship work. They employ dozens of people and make it so other companies can build things easier in my city. The instinct, however, is to think "I wish they would f** off with their big dumb trucks and their blocking traffic and their dangerous blahblahblah. I'm fine with industrial supply companies, but not in my backyard!". It takes an effort to stop yourself and remember to recognize their value. I could lose my job tomorrow, and maybe walk down the street and ask them if they need another set of hands moving gas cylinders around. I might one day need their services, or need the services of someone who needs theirs. 1. I wish the federal government would regulate the amount of noise pollution coming off some of these vehicles, yes, but that isn't a local issue.
  - flanked-evergl 2y ago
    People who are very sensitive to noise should not live in cities, which are, in fact, noisy places. If you want to live in the countryside, move to the countryside. Shutting down cities and moving all manufacturing to Muslims slaves in China is not a reasonable response to some few people in cities not being able to come to terms with what a city is. And it's not clear to me at all why you want people who do not live in your city to force the people in the city to adopt rules they don't want.
WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
I believe that chips will get more efficient as they get tuned towards AI needs. Also, energy costs will continue to fall as they have for thousands of years. Think about this, at one time we would have to put a lot of wood or animal matter to get enough energy for a few hours of light at night. Now it takes very few resources to get enough light for a whole night. It's so relatively inexpensive that we can light an area all night without having to think twice about the cost. Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?) from now that power consumption by AI will not be a problem.
- hoosieree 2y ago
  Heard of the Jevons paradox?
  - WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
    I guess your point is that as energy gets cheaper demand will increase therefore negating the savings. Well, that has not been the case when it comes to power. Look at the cost over the last 200 years and you'll see that the cost has dropped over that time. Energy cost is a fraction of what it was then but demand has exploded. There's no reason to think that things will be different in the future.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    I've heard it's mostly a fallacy. Jevon's paradox is the assertion that demand for energy is so elastic that increases in efficiency increase demand so much that this overwhelms the savings from efficiency. And in most cases this isn't true. One must be careful when looking at historical evidence to not say "efficiency increased, and demand increased, therefore demand increased because of efficiency", which is just a post hoc non sequitur.
- quonn 2y ago
  > Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?) Any evidence for that? I predict the exact opposite. The price of energy will rise.
zombiwoof 2y ago
one would think the human race would prioritize solutions like clean, renewable energy, food production, not USING energy to solve "AI problems" like summarizing my email, and putting Sly and Arnold in YouTube video remixes
- FridgeSeal 2y ago
  How dare you stand in the way of progress!!!! If we just sacrifice, 5 more New York’s worth of power, and the intellectual output of a generation, we will _totes_ get an AI that will finally tell us how to solve global warming!!!!!! (In a way that doesn’t hurt my feelings/money-machine like “use less fossil fuels” and “stop emitting carbon”) /s
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago
  for real, I wonder what this level (collective human time spent on AI) of effort could accomplish if focused on trying to build self-sufficient city scale indoor farming in the wealthier parts of the Middle East (ie somewhere where energy and water need to be figured out at scale), figure out how to make them more efficient, and then use that tech to build those indoor farms in developing countries. ... I already can sense somebody typing "but AI will help us design those better!!!1!!"
- dannersy 2y ago
  Yeah, it's quite sad. It's perplexing how the hype is being maintained at the moment. JP Morgan and Goldman both released reports more or less claiming AI is a deadend until we make some technological or supply chain breakthroughs. This is before we mention that OpenAI (and probably other AI projects/companies) seems to be operating at a significant loss with no foreseeable reprieve. Yet here we are, pouring money, resources, expertise, and people hours into an endless pit of hopes and possibilities of a possibility.
EGreg 2y ago
When Bitcoin was doing this, people were raising an alarm But AI fans will shrug and say “this has always been happening, AI is nothing new”. The usual refrain. Also, AI is way more useful than blockchain etc etc.
- n_ary 2y ago
  Crypto currency promised to overthrow the bankers, so they are bad and their energy waste is also bad for environment. AI intends to overthrow expensive people(costs) and make the bankers as well as investors plenty money. Climate change can wait, once AGI is achieved, it'll figure out how to solve all the climate issues and all will be well. That being said, AI here is no different from crypto, only diff. is, AI has immense backing and lobbying. Even our EU climate friendly overlords are parroting that AI will improve everything and more adaptation of AI is needed in all businesses and investment must be injected into anything that has AI. So, all is well in the end.
thelastgallon 2y ago
The best outcome for all of us is for tech companies to get into power. Tech got into telecom (dark fiber, undersea cabling) and provide free services (youtube, gmail, etc), which used to cost a lot historically. Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. We can do video conferences with upto 100 people worldwide for free. If tech companies get into power and break down the regulatory capture of utilities, they can make money off of energy storage and virtual power plants while providing free power for people.
- VoodooJuJu 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - fieldcny 2y ago
    But always always with Mus-informed grand intentions of changing the world for the better. All we need is another market to solve every problem! It makes everyone with power and money happy, they love markets because they are experts at fucking everyone every way possible. Thats how you build inter-generational wealth!
- staplers 2y ago
  all communication is free My internet and cellular bill say otherwise. Edit: OP's comment is almost nonsensical I feel it might be AI. "Traditionally youtube would cost hundreds of dollars"??
  - saulpw 2y ago
    Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100. For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly. A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include. Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.
asveikau 2y ago
I searched this article for "environment" and found nothing. Environmental costs and the source of that electricity is huge.
fuzzfactor 2y ago
I guess you'd have to figure if it was really worth it. If so, to who, and why?
waldrews 2y ago
Off topic, if 'Three New York Cities' has the dimensions of power, and 'Three Mississippi' has the dimensions of time, we've got a starting point for a new system of units...
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  NYC-Mississippis is a unit of energy!
- waldrews 2y ago
  Wyoming being a near-square state, a Root Wyoming would be the unit of length, and a California a unit of temperature, calibrated to the Death Valley record.
adultSwim 2y ago
Why is AI scrutinized while Search, Social, and Streaming all get a free pass?
lukev 2y ago
If you care about this, let's take cryptocurrency offline first. Crypto still uses many multiples of the power consumed by AI, and unlike AI it can _never_ improve and provide more utility per watt since it is inefficient by design.
- LeeroyWasHere 2y ago
  AI is on track to eclipse Bitcoin consumption.
skc 2y ago
Is AI using more or less power than crypto is/was at it's "peak"?
hcarvalhoalves 2y ago
The global IT infrastructure is expected to use 1/5 of the world's energy budget in 2025 by some estimates. The AI hype has the potential to push this even further in the next years. Considering we're in the middle of a climate crisis and racing to shift the energy matrix to renewables, having IT be a main responsible in increasing demand is absurd, we should be dramatically _decreasing_ energy demand.

168 points by sbuttgereit 2y ago

jeffbee 2y ago

100 years ago was there this much bad-faith handwringing about all the new roads they needed?

Cupertino95014 2y ago
You could go on newspapers.com (free for 7 days) and look at those old papers. I know that the Transcontinental Railroad was intensely controversial. What's "bad-faith" about it?
- qeternity 2y ago
  OP is saying the opposite: the TCR required huge investment, and was massively speculative, with a huge bubble ensuing. But rail travel did revolutionize the world, and few people sat around asking whether or not it was worth it.
  - Cupertino95014 2y ago
    TCR could have been justified by everyone having massive faith in the future, as OP is suggesting happened with roads. But you're quite wrong that "few people sat around asking whether or not it was worth it", as Iron Empires details: https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Empires-Robber-Railroads-America-ebook/dp/B07T1FT3D6/ref=sr_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Empires-Robber-Railroads-America... it was hugely controversial in Congress. I don't happen to know about roads, since that wasn't one single thing. But I doubt they happened because of blind faith in the future, either -- it was probably more businesses demanding roads NOW. So the argument that no one questioned them is dubious at best.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - qeternity 2y ago
      Sorry, you are correct. It was controversial. What I meant to say was that the AI bubble is feels different in that there seems to be relatively more skeptics versus railroad mania or the dot com bubble (but this could just be skewed by my own experiences). Whether or not this suggests a flawed value prop for AI is another story.
quantified 2y ago
What do mean by "they"? EDIT: who do you mean by "they"? (Rephrasing since some readers don't get that intent of the original question.) The handful of corporations interested in transport? Roads were a broad-based need. Roads have been built, used, maintained for thousands of years. The interstate highway system came from a government initiative, if there was a "they" it was broad-based enough to be "us". Railroads served needs that had existed for a long time and it was very clear what their use was from the time they were conceived, and there were more than a handful of participants in the movement of goods and people, since producers wanted greater reach and consumers wanted better access. By contrast to the very small number of "they" asking for more elecricity for data centers. How many people involved in the discussion are asking for the AI companies to be getting this juice?
- jeffbee 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
raldi 2y ago
Can you believe these “mammals”, burning energy around the clock to keep their blood warm all the time?
kibwen 2y ago
In the 60s there were, and they were right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolt
consteval 2y ago
No, but there really should of been. We've largely been conned into accepting a highly un-scalable transportation infrastructure by the automobile and oil industry.

Spivak 2y ago

https://archive.ph/rS3ze https://archive.ph/rS3ze > American Electric Power, which owns the line, has proposed a new, higher electricity rate for data centers and cryptocurrency miners that would lock them in as customers for a decade. The companies are balking. Look at that! Net Neutrality comes to the electrical wire. They could have charged different rates based on industrial/residential or volume but that wouldn't be optimal rent extraction. This is actually a really great article about the weird contract dynamics of large power customers and the chicken-egg problem of needing commitment for a certain amount of guaranteed spend to justify the cost of servicing them. It has nothing at all to do about AI.

XlA5vEKsMISoIln 2y ago
Comparing this to net neutrality just poisons the well when discussing NN. Internet service providers being able to arbitrarily adjust pricing based on data source stifles competition. Is there competition in the power supply industry where a client can pick their source? Well, aside from having their own generation. In this case transfer is the service and if one day huge demand cluster disappears the capacity for it is left to rust.
- Spivak 2y ago
  I don't think your point disagrees with mine. Charging based on demand is fine, requiring take-or-pay contracts when your request requires expensive grid upgrades is fine. Charging more because it's a datacenter as opposed to heavy industry, not fine. That's the part that mirrors NN. But to directly answer your question, yes there is competition. In most states, Ohio being one of them, you can choose who provides your power generation. And since companies are shopping states for where to build data centers AEP has a lot of competition for delivery.

motohagiography 2y ago

https://archive.is/rS3ze https://archive.is/rS3ze how is this stressing a grid that has to shed huge amounts of load to maintain availability off peak? instead of shedding the load, just price it effectively and the demand will even out and be a more efficient use of the fuel or generating station. the problem with our energy infra is a lack of consistent demand, and both AI and proof of work create the demand and a consumer of last resort that would make generation way more efficient. afaik, the main compute load is done in training, not in the queries. this article sounds like astroturfing a pretext for regulation under the auspices of "climate." also, the diminishing value of cash is accelerating so taking todays dollars and putting them into tomorrow's energy is probably the most fundamentally sound economic use of capital today. power generators were loaded with debt and used as public sector slush funds (in canada where they were nominally publicly owned) and now the companies are not very productive because they have to pass on the debt service cost to consumers, and prevent anyone from entering the market to offer competitive service that would interfere with that debt service. if you build new energy infra, you need to protect it from managers piling it with debt to loot it, but if you solve that real problem, demand is not a "problem," it's the most valuable thing in the universe.

parsimo2010 2y ago

There’s a saying I’ve heard that this reminded me of, “if you owe the bank two dollars, that’s your problem, but if you owe the bank two billion dollars, that’s the bank’s problem.” I think it’s relevant because it shows how responsibility shifts as things scale. If you owe the bank a little money then you are just a regular customer and you deal with the bank’s policies. But if you are a big player then it’s up to the bank to negotiate with you and come to mutually agreeable terms. These companies that have many big data centers are now big players. If they are stressing the grid they will need to be part of the solution in expanding the capacity and infrastructure, either by paying more to the electric companies or by including power infrastructure in their vertical integration. Microsoft has the right idea by investing in Three Mile Island, I think other big players will do similar things.

boricj 2y ago
Unlike banks, grids have an obvious solution to this problem: stop supplying these players with energy when the grid is at significant risk of a black out.
- brookst 2y ago
  Are you suggesting it should be illegal for these players to buy energy on the open market?
  - kazen44 2y ago
    No, but we should have a discussion about if it is worth it to expense so much energy for something with very little hard, real use case. Al be it bitcoin or LLM's. there is a lot of money behind AI, but i have yet to see any of them actually get us a use case which work reliably. Not to mention, AI is fun and all, but that energy could be far better spend making the economy less reliant on fossil fuel.
    - voidfunc 2y ago
      > there is a lot of money behind AI, but i have yet to see any of them actually get us a use case which work reliably. Classic HN. You personally can't see the value of X therefore the entire market for X is wrong.

OutOfHere 2y ago

And it will go from 9% to 90% over the century. Big tech companies might as well avoid the middleman and evolve into the power generation business, although it's not hard with an open design of a solar farm in the desert.

goda90 2y ago
Unless we come up with newer more efficient algorithms and specialized hardware for implementing AI.
- talldayo 2y ago
  glances at Bitcoin mining ASICs Any day, now.
  - jncfhnb 2y ago
    Bitcoin is definitionally inefficient to mine. That’s the whole point.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      The point is that difficulty is adjusted in accordance with network saturation to prevent a 51% attack. The network is not inherently inefficient unless you're attempting to monopolize it - you are still rewarded for using more efficient mining methods than your competitors. Which leads us to the GPUs. For a while everyone said ASICs (and the courageous ones, FPGAs) were the future of mining because they were inherently more efficient than GPU hardware could ever be. But it turns out that it's the other way around - mass-manufactured GPUs have access to more efficient silicon than any FPGA on the market could hope for. Similarly, AI chips that want to beat Nvidia on efficiency terms first have to climb a mountain of power usage that is inherent to their exponentially less-dense hardware.
      - yitternet 2y ago
        I think it dpends on the PoW system used. On a basic level you have memory hardening, and that can be used to force usage of bulk memory on GPUs or bulk storage like with Chia. For the more complex PoW you can use speculative execution to make CPUs most performant like RandomX. With bitcoin its more arbitrary but you can see how they could hard-fork to a different hardware-favoring system if desired.

sapphicsnail 2y ago

Are these AI companies already profitable or is it speculation that's causing them to get a ton of funding? AI is such a polarizing subject and I find it difficult to sift through all the hype and hate surrounding it.

Prbeek 2y ago
They generated a whooping three billion dollars last year.
- lolinder 2y ago
  But what was the cost of producing that revenue? At what point do they expect to break even on their investment? I can very quickly generate a lot of revenue if my investors will let me buy eggs at $0.50 each and resell them for $0.05, but I don't think I'd get any bites unless I could explain how that enterprise will eventually turn a profit.
  - Mistletoe 2y ago
    In 2021, SoftBank is very interested in your egg selling company.
    - stavros 2y ago
      After all, you can't make an omelet without breaking the bank on some eggs.
    - BoorishBears 2y ago
      If you can find a way to sell billions of dollars of eggs, even at a loss, people will invest. At scale you can increase the price of eggs, make the eggs cheaper, etc. Obviously the fact your eggs are artificially cheap is helping you sell them, but that won't be all there is to you as a seller. People underestimate how hard it is to sell things: you could have the cure to cancer in your hands today and still need to lose mllions to get anywhere with it.
  - 2y ago

idunnoman1222 2y ago

It is the first meaningful demand growth this century for the electricity industry How is this bad? Are the utilities just lazy?

jsnell 2y ago
But that's what the article is about. The utilities are being asked to make massive speculative investments in transmission infrastructure, but are dubious that the demand will actually be there when those projects finish in half a decade, and they'll be left holding the bag.
- kazen44 2y ago
  Also, infrastructure investment has a very long return on investment. (power plants for instance need to run decades to make back their profits, especially nuclear power plants. Other forms of energy generation come and massive ecological costs. Are we really prepared to spend this much energy on a speculative technology? especially when it is destroying the planet while doing so?
  - whimsicalism 2y ago
    we should already be spending a ton on renewables and transmission capacity. this is a good way to ensure emissions become sustainable
  - radicality 2y ago
    “to make back their profits” - is electricity / energy generation usually all owned by for-profit companies and not at all by government/public? Is it any different in USA vs other countries? I feel that energy generation (key component if we want to grow as a species) should be helped/sponsored by governments and not really expected to turn any profit.
- qeternity 2y ago
  This is why long term offtakes exist. The customer can prove their conviction and share in the risk. Extremely commonplace.

neonate 2y ago

https://archive.ph/rS3ze https://archive.ph/rS3ze

flanked-evergl 2y ago

The west needs to get over nimbyism and build infrastructure again. It's frankly embarrassing how much the west has crippled itself and then exported manufacturing to counties with much less regulation.

wpm 2y ago
It's an easy thought to have. I live in one of the US's larger metro areas in a leafy, former streetcar suburb then annexed, neighborhood. Near me, just down the street, is an old industrial plot that supplies materials and tools for other industrial uses. Their trucks are large. Their lots are small. Each day is a dance of large flatbeds loading up for the next day, moving in and out of the lots, and other customers and their large flatbeds coming to stock up. Many leave by driving down the street in front of my house. Is it annoying? Yes. Their trucks are heavy enough to shake the house when they go over a bump. They are loud as hell too. [1] Do I want to shut the company down? Of course not. They are my neighbors, for better or for worse. I have to try to make the relationship work. They employ dozens of people and make it so other companies can build things easier in my city. The instinct, however, is to think "I wish they would f** off with their big dumb trucks and their blocking traffic and their dangerous blahblahblah. I'm fine with industrial supply companies, but not in my backyard!". It takes an effort to stop yourself and remember to recognize their value. I could lose my job tomorrow, and maybe walk down the street and ask them if they need another set of hands moving gas cylinders around. I might one day need their services, or need the services of someone who needs theirs. 1. I wish the federal government would regulate the amount of noise pollution coming off some of these vehicles, yes, but that isn't a local issue.
- flanked-evergl 2y ago
  People who are very sensitive to noise should not live in cities, which are, in fact, noisy places. If you want to live in the countryside, move to the countryside. Shutting down cities and moving all manufacturing to Muslims slaves in China is not a reasonable response to some few people in cities not being able to come to terms with what a city is. And it's not clear to me at all why you want people who do not live in your city to force the people in the city to adopt rules they don't want.

WheelsAtLarge 2y ago

I believe that chips will get more efficient as they get tuned towards AI needs. Also, energy costs will continue to fall as they have for thousands of years. Think about this, at one time we would have to put a lot of wood or animal matter to get enough energy for a few hours of light at night. Now it takes very few resources to get enough light for a whole night. It's so relatively inexpensive that we can light an area all night without having to think twice about the cost. Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?) from now that power consumption by AI will not be a problem.

hoosieree 2y ago
Heard of the Jevons paradox?
- WheelsAtLarge 2y ago
  I guess your point is that as energy gets cheaper demand will increase therefore negating the savings. Well, that has not been the case when it comes to power. Look at the cost over the last 200 years and you'll see that the cost has dropped over that time. Energy cost is a fraction of what it was then but demand has exploded. There's no reason to think that things will be different in the future.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  I've heard it's mostly a fallacy. Jevon's paradox is the assertion that demand for energy is so elastic that increases in efficiency increase demand so much that this overwhelms the savings from efficiency. And in most cases this isn't true. One must be careful when looking at historical evidence to not say "efficiency increased, and demand increased, therefore demand increased because of efficiency", which is just a post hoc non sequitur.
quonn 2y ago
> Energy will get so inexpensive in a few years (10?) Any evidence for that? I predict the exact opposite. The price of energy will rise.

zombiwoof 2y ago

one would think the human race would prioritize solutions like clean, renewable energy, food production, not USING energy to solve "AI problems" like summarizing my email, and putting Sly and Arnold in YouTube video remixes

FridgeSeal 2y ago
How dare you stand in the way of progress!!!! If we just sacrifice, 5 more New York’s worth of power, and the intellectual output of a generation, we will _totes_ get an AI that will finally tell us how to solve global warming!!!!!! (In a way that doesn’t hurt my feelings/money-machine like “use less fossil fuels” and “stop emitting carbon”) /s
kylehotchkiss 2y ago
for real, I wonder what this level (collective human time spent on AI) of effort could accomplish if focused on trying to build self-sufficient city scale indoor farming in the wealthier parts of the Middle East (ie somewhere where energy and water need to be figured out at scale), figure out how to make them more efficient, and then use that tech to build those indoor farms in developing countries. ... I already can sense somebody typing "but AI will help us design those better!!!1!!"
dannersy 2y ago
Yeah, it's quite sad. It's perplexing how the hype is being maintained at the moment. JP Morgan and Goldman both released reports more or less claiming AI is a deadend until we make some technological or supply chain breakthroughs. This is before we mention that OpenAI (and probably other AI projects/companies) seems to be operating at a significant loss with no foreseeable reprieve. Yet here we are, pouring money, resources, expertise, and people hours into an endless pit of hopes and possibilities of a possibility.

EGreg 2y ago

When Bitcoin was doing this, people were raising an alarm But AI fans will shrug and say “this has always been happening, AI is nothing new”. The usual refrain. Also, AI is way more useful than blockchain etc etc.

n_ary 2y ago
Crypto currency promised to overthrow the bankers, so they are bad and their energy waste is also bad for environment. AI intends to overthrow expensive people(costs) and make the bankers as well as investors plenty money. Climate change can wait, once AGI is achieved, it'll figure out how to solve all the climate issues and all will be well. That being said, AI here is no different from crypto, only diff. is, AI has immense backing and lobbying. Even our EU climate friendly overlords are parroting that AI will improve everything and more adaptation of AI is needed in all businesses and investment must be injected into anything that has AI. So, all is well in the end.

thelastgallon 2y ago

The best outcome for all of us is for tech companies to get into power. Tech got into telecom (dark fiber, undersea cabling) and provide free services (youtube, gmail, etc), which used to cost a lot historically. Everyone had to shell out a few hundred dollars/month just for phone calls (billed per minute) and txt messages. Now, we are at a point all communication is free. We can do video conferences with upto 100 people worldwide for free. If tech companies get into power and break down the regulatory capture of utilities, they can make money off of energy storage and virtual power plants while providing free power for people.

VoodooJuJu 2y ago
[flagged]
- fieldcny 2y ago
  But always always with Mus-informed grand intentions of changing the world for the better. All we need is another market to solve every problem! It makes everyone with power and money happy, they love markets because they are experts at fucking everyone every way possible. Thats how you build inter-generational wealth!
staplers 2y ago
all communication is free My internet and cellular bill say otherwise. Edit: OP's comment is almost nonsensical I feel it might be AI. "Traditionally youtube would cost hundreds of dollars"??
- saulpw 2y ago
  Communication is not quite "free", but it is effectively unmetered. Compare with pre-internet communication, where "long-distance" calls (outside your area code) were billed per-minute. An hour-long conversation with your boyfriend who lived an hour away? $5. Across the country? $10. Across the world? $100. For data, Compuserve charged $5/hour for access, regardless of whether you used 300bps or 28.8kbps. So a 1MB download could cost anywhere from 50 cents (28.8k at night) to $10 (2400bps during the day). And that was in addition to the cost of having a phone line in the first place, not to mention the hardware--a decently fast modem cost several hundred dollars, and needed to be replaced every couple of years as the tech was improving relentlessly. A service like Youtube with on-demand streaming video of just about any content you can imagine would certainly be worth hundreds of dollars a month. Hell, cable television with 50 channels was $30-50/mo (or more depending on whether or not you splurged for HBO/etc), and that was whatever grab bag of content they decided to include. Remember too that all these are 1990s prices, so you need to at least double them to account for inflation.

asveikau 2y ago

I searched this article for "environment" and found nothing. Environmental costs and the source of that electricity is huge.

fuzzfactor 2y ago

I guess you'd have to figure if it was really worth it. If so, to who, and why?

waldrews 2y ago

Off topic, if 'Three New York Cities' has the dimensions of power, and 'Three Mississippi' has the dimensions of time, we've got a starting point for a new system of units...

datadrivenangel 2y ago
NYC-Mississippis is a unit of energy!
waldrews 2y ago
Wyoming being a near-square state, a Root Wyoming would be the unit of length, and a California a unit of temperature, calibrated to the Death Valley record.

adultSwim 2y ago

Why is AI scrutinized while Search, Social, and Streaming all get a free pass?

lukev 2y ago

If you care about this, let's take cryptocurrency offline first. Crypto still uses many multiples of the power consumed by AI, and unlike AI it can _never_ improve and provide more utility per watt since it is inefficient by design.

LeeroyWasHere 2y ago
AI is on track to eclipse Bitcoin consumption.

skc 2y ago

Is AI using more or less power than crypto is/was at it's "peak"?

hcarvalhoalves 2y ago

The global IT infrastructure is expected to use 1/5 of the world's energy budget in 2025 by some estimates. The AI hype has the potential to push this even further in the next years. Considering we're in the middle of a climate crisis and racing to shift the energy matrix to renewables, having IT be a main responsible in increasing demand is absurd, we should be dramatically _decreasing_ energy demand.