7 ms·

At Amazon's biggest data center, everything is supersized for AI

89 points by pseudolus 1y ago

pandastronaut 1y ago
"The utility told regulators in April that it expected to use natural gas plants to provide about three-quarters of the additional power that would be needed by 2030" Not a good news here.
pseudolus 1y ago
https://archive.ph/9ytmy https://archive.ph/9ytmy
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
> After building seven data centers in Indiana, Amazon plans to build 23 more. Jesus
- v5v3 1y ago
  Large numbers of the 8 billion people in the world are still not digitally literate. The demand from all the poorer countries with large populations is only going to go up as their kids grow up with tech.
  - altcognito 1y ago
    I'd imagine they would build those data centers closer to those populations.
  - manquer 1y ago
    It is not for inference so population or market does not matter, this is only for training and only for Anthropic, which is pretty unprecedented in the history computing/internet. > all the poorer countries with large populations It won't move the needle even if this infra is exclusively for inference. These projects are based on a economic thesis. Companies are investing $10s-100B / year expecting to make the money and more back. At this scale of money RoI will not come from parts of the world with per capita GDP in the low thousands or less even if there are billions of them and all of them are expected to use these new tools. This is same reason Apple is the richest company in the world despite selling a fraction of droid devices. Every mobile app developer knows all money is only in iOS. The top 10% people in the world as a market can make a company much more than the rest 90% combined.
dude250711 1y ago
Once the overall AI bubble bursts/deflates, would they be able to re-purpose it for other workloads e.g. cloud gaming? Though, maybe Midjourney or other niche AI companies could buy it for the right price I guess.
- progbits 1y ago
  The server/ML GPUs are not great for gaming, they strip out all the specialized shader/pixel units to cram in more general compute cores. In theory you could write games with just those but aside from the amount of work needed I'm not sure if the performance would be good enough, the specialized texture samplers etc can be faster than general purpose compute shaders. Also, for cloud gaming you want very low latency, so few GPUs all over the world in local POPs, not a lot of GPUs in few large data centers.
- tyingq 1y ago
  "Trainium accelerator" doesn't sound like it would be terribly useful outside it's current niche. It's not clear how much of the spend is that kind of thing versus general purpose compute and storage.
  - coredog64 1y ago
    For the previous generation, AWS had a split where Trainium == model training and Inferentia == inference. With the current generation, they are also recommending smaller Trainium configurations for inference. Even if nobody trains another model, the Trainium chips will be useful for inference of existing models that have been recompiled for it.
- closewith 1y ago
  This feels like saying when the dot-com bubble burst, could the servers be re-purposed as mainframes. Whatever about valuations and individual stocks, AI/LLM workloads are only going up.
  - 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago
DrBazza 1y ago
> is the first in a new generation of data centers being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters Near both the Casadia fault that's produced magnitude 9 earthquakes and a chain of active volcanoes. Both of which are statistically likely. I do wonder what contingency plans Amazon (and Microsoft) have in the event of a megathrust earthquake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Forecasts_of_the_next_major_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Forec... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier#Modern_activity_and_threat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier#Modern_activity_...
- readthenotes1 1y ago
  It is named project rainier, but the facilities are in Indiana. If you're speaking metaphorically, the mega thrust would be some cataclysmic world event like China invading Taiwan. In which case they won't need to earn natural gas to power or waste fresh water to cool...
  - jltsiren 1y ago
    Megathrust earthquakes are pretty common around the world. Some of them cause major damage, such as the ones in 2004 and 2011. But even then, the impact is mostly regional.
- PNewling 1y ago
  > Both of which are statistically likely. It's seems a little dishonest to not include that 'statistically likely' is on a geological time scale.
progbits 1y ago
> The local utility will largely use natural gas to generate the additional electricity needed to power Amazon’s data center Sad, but expected.
- sigmoid10 1y ago
  At this point we have to be glad it's not coal. After all we have a president that just passed an executive order to foster the "Beautiful Clean Coal Industry"
  - blibble 1y ago
    > At this point we have to be glad it's not coal. it will be if the coal price drops far enough
- gadders 1y ago
  It's either that or nuclear.
  - progbits 1y ago
    You say that as if nuclear was bad?
    - gadders 1y ago
      Not at all. I think it's probably the best option if you want guaranteed electricity.
  - bflesch 1y ago
    False equivalence bias
    - gadders 1y ago
      Dunning–Kruger effect
- lordswork 1y ago
yahoozoo 1y ago
> The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an A.I. system that matches the human brain. Sentences like this never ceases to amaze me. All of this juice to attempt to match what a single human brain can do with its relatively low resource requirements.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 1y ago
  I think you’re conflating things. It’s not a single human brain. It’s processing power to provide the human trove of knowledge and reasoning at the beck and call of millions of people nearly simultaneously. No single person would be able to do that.
  - threetonesun 1y ago
    No, but we had done a pretty good job of storing and indexing it all on this thing called the Internet.
    - matt123456789 1y ago
      And for the same purpose before that we had, or rather have, since it is still very much in use today, the Dewey Decimal System. Peering further onward still into the annals of library science, one can find even more creative and revealing methods of indexing human knowledge. In doing so, one might even be inclined to believe that the state of the science has come so far as to be considered solved. Alas.
      - threetonesun 1y ago
        I think if you went to the library and asked for information on "how to build a chicken coop" and the librarian took 60 books related to chickens and building and farming, cut up the words in them, then arranged them in a way they found satisfying, you might start going to a different library.
v5v3 1y ago
>A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium. Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  it's probably not actually rich soil, maybe a writer's flourish - post harvest fields are pretty much barren of nutrients and life
- maxerickson 1y ago
  The county it is located in is about 290,000 acres. Indiana is about 23 million acres.
- lordswork 1y ago
  This comment got me wondering whether loss of farmland in the US is a serious issue. It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances. That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently. In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
  - TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
    One of the major problems facing American agriculture is that there are fewer and fewer farmers/farming families. Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround. Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment. Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.
Domainzsite 1y ago
[dead]
tartoran 1y ago
Im a bit clueless on this subject but I've been wondering why isn't this heat used productively to, say, generate electricity. Why aren't AI datacenters for example use the heat to provide the municipality with hot water for example?
- jandrewrogers 1y ago
  Electricity from heat is generated by temperature differences. Large differences are much more efficient than small differences and data centers are "small differences" for these purposes. Unless you can use the heat directly, it won't be worth it to convert it into electricity.
  - foepys 1y ago
    Using heatpumps you only need a little electricity to heat quite a few homes with district heating. But there probably is no nearby district to be heated.
    - delfinom 1y ago
      And you only need heating for at the very most, 6 months of the year in the US. Though that's shrunk depending on region in recent years.
      - foepys 1y ago
        True for heating but warm water is in demand all the time.
  - coredog64 1y ago
    The limits are described by Carnot's theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna... Also important to remember when calculating this for yourself that the temperatures must be represented using an absolute scale (i.e. Kelvins or degrees Rankine).
- 1y ago

89 points by pseudolus 1y ago

"The utility told regulators in April that it expected to use natural gas plants to provide about three-quarters of the additional power that would be needed by 2030" Not a good news here.

pseudolus 1y ago

https://archive.ph/9ytmy https://archive.ph/9ytmy

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

> After building seven data centers in Indiana, Amazon plans to build 23 more. Jesus

v5v3 1y ago
Large numbers of the 8 billion people in the world are still not digitally literate. The demand from all the poorer countries with large populations is only going to go up as their kids grow up with tech.
- altcognito 1y ago
  I'd imagine they would build those data centers closer to those populations.
- manquer 1y ago
  It is not for inference so population or market does not matter, this is only for training and only for Anthropic, which is pretty unprecedented in the history computing/internet. > all the poorer countries with large populations It won't move the needle even if this infra is exclusively for inference. These projects are based on a economic thesis. Companies are investing $10s-100B / year expecting to make the money and more back. At this scale of money RoI will not come from parts of the world with per capita GDP in the low thousands or less even if there are billions of them and all of them are expected to use these new tools. This is same reason Apple is the richest company in the world despite selling a fraction of droid devices. Every mobile app developer knows all money is only in iOS. The top 10% people in the world as a market can make a company much more than the rest 90% combined.

dude250711 1y ago

Once the overall AI bubble bursts/deflates, would they be able to re-purpose it for other workloads e.g. cloud gaming? Though, maybe Midjourney or other niche AI companies could buy it for the right price I guess.

progbits 1y ago
The server/ML GPUs are not great for gaming, they strip out all the specialized shader/pixel units to cram in more general compute cores. In theory you could write games with just those but aside from the amount of work needed I'm not sure if the performance would be good enough, the specialized texture samplers etc can be faster than general purpose compute shaders. Also, for cloud gaming you want very low latency, so few GPUs all over the world in local POPs, not a lot of GPUs in few large data centers.
tyingq 1y ago
"Trainium accelerator" doesn't sound like it would be terribly useful outside it's current niche. It's not clear how much of the spend is that kind of thing versus general purpose compute and storage.
- coredog64 1y ago
  For the previous generation, AWS had a split where Trainium == model training and Inferentia == inference. With the current generation, they are also recommending smaller Trainium configurations for inference. Even if nobody trains another model, the Trainium chips will be useful for inference of existing models that have been recompiled for it.
closewith 1y ago
This feels like saying when the dot-com bubble burst, could the servers be re-purposed as mainframes. Whatever about valuations and individual stocks, AI/LLM workloads are only going up.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y ago

DrBazza 1y ago

> is the first in a new generation of data centers being built by Amazon, and part of what the company calls Project Rainier, after the mountain that looms near its Seattle headquarters Near both the Casadia fault that's produced magnitude 9 earthquakes and a chain of active volcanoes. Both of which are statistically likely. I do wonder what contingency plans Amazon (and Microsoft) have in the event of a megathrust earthquake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Forecasts_of_the_next_major_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Forec... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier#Modern_activity_and_threat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier#Modern_activity_...

readthenotes1 1y ago
It is named project rainier, but the facilities are in Indiana. If you're speaking metaphorically, the mega thrust would be some cataclysmic world event like China invading Taiwan. In which case they won't need to earn natural gas to power or waste fresh water to cool...
- jltsiren 1y ago
  Megathrust earthquakes are pretty common around the world. Some of them cause major damage, such as the ones in 2004 and 2011. But even then, the impact is mostly regional.
PNewling 1y ago
> Both of which are statistically likely. It's seems a little dishonest to not include that 'statistically likely' is on a geological time scale.

progbits 1y ago

> The local utility will largely use natural gas to generate the additional electricity needed to power Amazon’s data center Sad, but expected.

sigmoid10 1y ago
At this point we have to be glad it's not coal. After all we have a president that just passed an executive order to foster the "Beautiful Clean Coal Industry"
- blibble 1y ago
  > At this point we have to be glad it's not coal. it will be if the coal price drops far enough
gadders 1y ago
It's either that or nuclear.
- progbits 1y ago
  You say that as if nuclear was bad?
  - gadders 1y ago
    Not at all. I think it's probably the best option if you want guaranteed electricity.
- bflesch 1y ago
  False equivalence bias
  - gadders 1y ago
    Dunning–Kruger effect
lordswork 1y ago

yahoozoo 1y ago

> The facility will consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power a million homes. Each year, it will use millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating. And it was built with a single customer in mind: the A.I. start-up Anthropic, which aims to create an A.I. system that matches the human brain. Sentences like this never ceases to amaze me. All of this juice to attempt to match what a single human brain can do with its relatively low resource requirements.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mc32 1y ago
I think you’re conflating things. It’s not a single human brain. It’s processing power to provide the human trove of knowledge and reasoning at the beck and call of millions of people nearly simultaneously. No single person would be able to do that.
- threetonesun 1y ago
  No, but we had done a pretty good job of storing and indexing it all on this thing called the Internet.
  - matt123456789 1y ago
    And for the same purpose before that we had, or rather have, since it is still very much in use today, the Dewey Decimal System. Peering further onward still into the annals of library science, one can find even more creative and revealing methods of indexing human knowledge. In doing so, one might even be inclined to believe that the state of the science has come so far as to be considered solved. Alas.
    - threetonesun 1y ago
      I think if you went to the library and asked for information on "how to build a chicken coop" and the librarian took 60 books related to chickens and building and farming, cut up the words in them, then arranged them in a way they found satisfying, you might start going to a different library.

v5v3 1y ago

>A year ago, a 1,200-acre stretch of farmland outside New Carlisle, Ind., was an empty cornfield. Now, seven Amazon data centers rise up from the rich soil, each larger than a football stadium. Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields

micromacrofoot 1y ago
it's probably not actually rich soil, maybe a writer's flourish - post harvest fields are pretty much barren of nutrients and life
maxerickson 1y ago
The county it is located in is about 290,000 acres. Indiana is about 23 million acres.
lordswork 1y ago
This comment got me wondering whether loss of farmland in the US is a serious issue. It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances. That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently. In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
- TheNewsIsHere 1y ago
  One of the major problems facing American agriculture is that there are fewer and fewer farmers/farming families. Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround. Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment. Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.

Domainzsite 1y ago

[dead]

tartoran 1y ago

Im a bit clueless on this subject but I've been wondering why isn't this heat used productively to, say, generate electricity. Why aren't AI datacenters for example use the heat to provide the municipality with hot water for example?

jandrewrogers 1y ago
Electricity from heat is generated by temperature differences. Large differences are much more efficient than small differences and data centers are "small differences" for these purposes. Unless you can use the heat directly, it won't be worth it to convert it into electricity.
- foepys 1y ago
  Using heatpumps you only need a little electricity to heat quite a few homes with district heating. But there probably is no nearby district to be heated.
  - delfinom 1y ago
    And you only need heating for at the very most, 6 months of the year in the US. Though that's shrunk depending on region in recent years.
    - foepys 1y ago
      True for heating but warm water is in demand all the time.
- coredog64 1y ago
  The limits are described by Carnot's theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodynamics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot%27s_theorem_(thermodyna... Also important to remember when calculating this for yourself that the temperatures must be represented using an absolute scale (i.e. Kelvins or degrees Rankine).
1y ago