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I do not understand why they chose Norway. I would choose a country where it is easy to build up a new power plant quickly with solar and wind, close to the sit
by astahlx 1y ago
I do not understand why they chose Norway. I would choose a country where it is easy to build up a new power plant quickly with solar and wind, close to the site of the data center. Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry?
- kingofmen 1y ago> Maybe they just have too much electricity up there that is not needed by the population or existing industry? Yes, this is basically the case. It's quite expensive to transfer power across several degrees of latitude, and as a result, the price of power in the south of Norway is sometimes orders of magnitude higher than in the north.
- rednafi 1y agoI understand why they didn’t choose Germany: they didn’t want to buy the GPUs in cash and send the receipts via Fax.
- bloqs 1y agothis is so hilariously true
- BlindEyeHalo 1y agoAnd as a reward you pay one of the highest electricity costs in Europe.
- blackqueeriroh 1y agoGeothermal is a big deal in Norway as well.
- benrutter 1y agoNorway has a good amount of power generation, and most notably, excellent hydro storage, meaning it has a good spread of cheaper power, rather than peaks and valleys of high and low cost like the UK has (which has lots of wind, but little storage).
- TacticalCoder 1y ago[dead]
- qoez 1y agoA big reason to not do it lower down in europe is also just that it's naturally very cold in northern norway so you already save on energy that would be needed to cool it. Meta has datacenters at around the same latitude but in sweden for the same reason.
- saubeidl 1y agoIt'll be a bit less cold in northern norway with this thing - accelerating ice cap melt and sea level rise. Doomsday cult.
- literalAardvark 1y agoAll of modern life does that. AI could also bring some solutions instead of just perpetuating problems. And on a cost per intelligence token basis it's obscenely cheap anyway.
- saubeidl 1y agoMaybe it's time we rethink modern life instead of using it as an excuse to worsen things?
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y agoI've imagined for a long time that eventually we'll shift the bulk of our heavy computation closer to the poles, and use those data centers to power our society. You either use solar power and shift the computation from north pole to south pole seasonally depending on which place is in eternal sunshine, or, since these places are so far away from major population centers, you could just plop down a bunch of giant nuclear reactors without too much resistance.
- ZeroGravitas 1y agoYou might even be able to sell some of that heat to a local heat network to supply other businesses and homes.
- 1y ago
- literalAardvark 1y agoWell, for one they have a lot of money and would be a good customer for a government AI
- numpad0 1y agoMaybe solar and wind aren't viable as they might seem, and/or, Norway isn't as populous as people would think. Total population is just 5.5m, which is the scale of an average US state or a major city in Asia. Workload would be smaller than typical mental image of "a gigantic AI datacenter that serves everyone in a country".
- alexey-salmin 1y agoIt could be that solar and wind is not a good way to power the datacenter.
- Ekaros 1y agoNorthern Norway has lot of cheap and stable hydro capacity. The prices there for baseload power are cheap. Interesting part of that market is that they lack internal north-south transfer capacity. So much that Finland which has relatively more north-south capacity has cheaper electricity at same latitude than in Norway...
- rasz 1y agohttps://euenergy.live https://euenergy.live 2 €/MWh today