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There are many more millions of GPUs in computers and game consoles around the world burning electricity for your entertainment, for decades. The same class of
by elpocko 1y ago
There are many more millions of GPUs in computers and game consoles around the world burning electricity for your entertainment, for decades. The same class of devices. The environmental impact of having pretty pixels on your screens is at least an order of magnitude higher than what it is for AI, for inference and training. I don't see anyone being up in arms about that.
- coliveira 1y agoYour calculations must be severely off, because I never heard anyone advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors to power game consoles around the world. However, we hear everyday that we need to build these reactors right now if we want to have AI.
- mulmen 1y agoXboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. Data centers are …centralized. Dedicated power plants for large data center installations are not new.
- gruez 1y ago>Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers are geographically distributed and so is their power generation. This is irrelevant because most "Xboxes, smartphones, and personal computers" are powered by centralized fossil fuel power plants that could plausibly be replaced with nuclear reactors, just like the power plant for a datacenter can be replaced with nuclear reactors.
- elpocko 1y agoI hear people advocating for the construction of nuclear reactors every day. They don't mention gaming, just like they don't mention refrigerators or washing machines specifically. A gaming machine consumes the same amount of energy as a machine used for AI, it's the same hardware. AI consumes it for seconds per user, while one gaming machine is used for hours per session. The energy required by one human to play a game for one hour could serve hundreds or thousands of AI users.
- rybosworld 1y agoThe GPU's used for AI have significantly higher utilization rates than gaming GPU's... Here's some napkin math: H100: 61% utilization / 700W ~ 3.7MW/year RTX 3080: 10% utilization / 320W ~ 0.27MW/year
- elpocko 1y agoHow many AI users are served using a single H100 per time, and how many gamers are served using a single 3080 per time? How many gamers are simultaneously running a 3080 or equivalent for their entertainment?
- mystified5016 1y agoYes, AI users are being served by much more than one GPU at a time. Which is why the power used is so much higher than a single gaming pc
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- elpocko 1y agoThousands of users are being served by those GPUs. A gaming PC has one user. I can't believe I have to point this out on HN of all places.
- rybosworld 1y ago
- gruez 1y agoThat's his point? Greenpace wants AI datacenters to be built with clean energy. elpocko points out that plenty of other pointless electricity consumers also aren't being built with clean energy today. That's not an argument against green energy, but is pointing out that greenpace isn't very rigorous with their pleas. They're seemingly picking whatever is the most topical. We should be against this, because latching on to the latest thing basically guarantees that the next thing rolls around, all the momentum will be lost. Remember when everyone was up in arms about crypto mining? How it's barely brought up because everyone's focused on AI.
- namuol 1y agoShow your math.
- elpocko 1y agoBesides common sense, I can tell you about my kW h counter going brrr when playing games (400 W continuously, sometimes for hours on end) vs. running Stable Diffusion or Llama-whatever (400 W for 15 seconds every 3 minutes for an hour or two). Extrapolate from that.
- Night_Thastus 1y agoThe GPUs in PCs, consoles and phones aren't running full tilt 24/7. They run very bursty workloads for a couple hours a day at most. Those in AI data centers never stop running and completely utilize their capacity. The difference in power usage is astronomical.
- whiplash451 1y agoCan you please at least do the back-of-the-envelope math behind the “astronomical”? I don’t claim to know, but we ought to be able to have a rational debate on this.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoYou don't need concrete numbers or even napkin math to realize that a gaming computer running a GPU for a couple of hours in the evening is going to use much less energy than a GPU running maxed out 24/7 for AI There's nothing irrational about suggesting AI GPUs are consuming far more power
- elpocko 1y agoYes, one AI GPU uses more energy than one GPU used for gaming. The one AI GPU however is shared between a large number of users, while the one gaming GPU is used by one player. Apparently a single gaming GPU can be used to run an LLM that serves hundreds of concurrent requests. > Benchmarking Llama 3.1 8B (fp16) on our 1x RTX 3090 instance suggests that it can support apps with thousands of users by achieving reasonable tokens per second at 100+ concurrent requests. https://backprop.co/environments/vllm https://backprop.co/environments/vllm
- jesus_666 1y agoBut that's a tiny model; it's the smallest version of Llama 3.1. The commercially marketed models are way bigger - e.g. GPT-4 has been estimated to use about 1.76 trillion parameters, 220 times more than the Llama build you mentioned. Their resource and performance requirements are vastly different. You're essentially arguing that shipping naval diesel aggregates must be trivial because you can fit a dozen moped motors on the bed of your pickup truck just fine.
- pavlov 1y agoIt’s not the same class of device. A typical NVIDIA server GPU consumes 700W, and a server might have eight of them, so 5.6kW. A PlayStation 5 consumes 200W total.
- nemo 1y agoThere are a lot of folks who vastly underestimate the carbon output of current AI training and work, and you're among them. The number of data centers being raised right now with increased power planning around data centers around the globe points to a reality of energy consumption that's probably an order of magnitude higher than you imagine. At a time when the costs of carbon poisoning the oceans is getting really ugly and driving extinctions, melting polar ice, and driving global warming, writing off a major new generator of atmospheric carbon is dangerously irresponsible. https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energ...
- js8 1y agoHowever, each consumer is paying for his own gaming console power. With AI (but also other "free" Internet services), there is a tragedy of commons (a coordination) problem, where you don't know the direct cost to you and so you (and others) will not make rational choices.
- toshinoriyagi 1y agoThe most common GPU per the steam survey is the RTX 3060 at 170W TDP. A huge % of users have cards near or below this TDP. The SXM H100 has a 700W TDP, and will spend far more of its life at or near that value. Given an average ~8 hours of work/school and ~8 hours of sleep, gaming GPUs likely don't use anywhere near as much power. Plus, even when they are on, they will probably idle near 30W-60W for a lot of time spent browsing the web or watching videos. There are more gaming GPUs in existence right now, but the number of AI chips is likely closing that gap rapidly. And of course, what is that energy being used for? People playing games are typically having fun, bonding with friends, or engaging in social behavior. A huge amount of AI is illegally trained on copyrighted works without license to use them, causing significant harm to various fields. Plus the deluge of AI slop bogging down the internet, social media, forums, image/art-hosting sites, search, and more. I think it will be a while before modern generative AI is even close to providing value in aggregate.