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It's a large power plant (400+ MW and rising), rapidly assembled from small, modular components. That's a remarkable thing from any point of view. The other th
by perihelions 1y ago
It's a large power plant (400+ MW and rising), rapidly assembled from small, modular components. That's a remarkable thing from any point of view.
The other threads on this topic (powering AI hyperscalers) are usually about nuclear fission, which most of the large players are investing in. Those power plants often take 10+ years to build. One could imagine small reactor modules akin to these 16 MW shipping containers, built in factories and shipped on demand like these, to be assembled into a full power plant in weeks. If someone were to get that business model working, they'd dominate the industry. (Just how big of a premium did xAI pay their vendor, to have all this shipped halfway around the world on a priority schedule?)
- blibble 1y agogiven musk's attitude to the waste management (just pump it into the lungs of the local population), god help us if he gets access to nuclear reactors
- glowiefedposter 1y ago[dead]
- steelbrain 1y ago> just pump it into the lungs of the local population Source please? I'm not aware of this
- roxolotl 1y agoSpaceX: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna166283 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna166283 Tesla: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-tesla-environment-1263cd60 https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-tesla-environme... Of course XAI is this article we’re all commenting on but here’s an older one: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
- inemesitaffia 1y agoLara Kolodnys article claiming there's Mercury in the water? That's the article you linked?
- rsynnott 1y agoThere’s a reason this isn’t generally done for real power plants; these little turbines are pretty inefficient. This sort of thing is not uncommon for data centers and other things that need either a lot of backup power or a lot of temporary power, but it would not make for an economically viable power plant.
- ben_w 1y agoNot that remarkable. I mean 400 MW is tiling a 4km square with cheap PV, even after accounting for capacity factor. And 400 MW is also what you get from 1052 Tesla Model 3's at max acceleration, according to their website (though obviously draining a 74kWh battery at 510hp empties it rather a lot faster than "overnight"), and ICEs are also tiny power plants so you get the same power out from order-of-magnitude same number of those. In fact, this is why I'm putting the money I can set aside for investments, into China rather than the USA: they're speed-running cheap PV and batteries, which are cheaper than most everything else right now.