5 ms·
A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise
- jedberg 1y agoI worked for a company making GPU clouds. The biggest problem we had for deployments was not getting GPUs -- we had plenty of those sitting in warehouses. The biggest issue was finding data center space with sufficient power and cooling. There was plenty of square footage, just not enough power for it all. They're now building gigawatt datacenters to handle all the GPUs. The big question is were to build them. There are only a few places with cheap and plentiful power. One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big and there is a lot of regulation). Another is Texas (except their grid isn't very stable). And the last is China. And you can't build a datacenter in China unless you're Chinese. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out. Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones. Edit: I wrote this comment four days ago. I couldn't figure out why I was suddenly getting a bunch of replies to it. Apparently when HN does a second chance, they just reset the time on all the comments. Odd, but I guess it makes sense knowing what I know about how the sorting is calculated. It's probably the easiest way.
- philipallstar 1y agoMaking it easier to build nuclear power stations would be extremely useful. Let's hope nothing of value is lost in that process.
- MadDemon 1y agoPlaces further north are great contenders because of the free cooling. Also, many of them have cheap electricity from hydro or even geothermal, like Iceland.
- general1726 1y agoI bet on natural gas powerplants will start being built together with data centers.
- wmf 1y agoIronically xAI is already doing this.
- joak 1y agoNuclear power plants take something like a decade to build (after permitting) It makes more sense to go for PV plus batteries that can be installed in a matter of weeks
- lukebechtel 1y agohow much of that 10 years is the physical limit, and how much is social / cultural / organizational / political overhead?
- protocolture 1y agoFrom memory, when the brits got out of their own way they could build a nuke plant every 6-8 years.
- adrianN 1y agoDoes that matter much when you want to have a datacenter as quickly as possible? It’s not like those things will change quickly.
- lukebechtel 1y agoyes -- knowing the physical limit can motivate moving closer to it.
- jeffbee 1y ago> after permitting Load-bearing parenthetical! > Nuclear power plants take something like a decade to build The most-recently completed fission power station on this planet needed 23 years under construction and it is still in testing. A recent American one took 15 years.
- protocolture 1y agoWhen the brits were at it (With insourced nuclear engineering and low regulatory overhead) they could crank them out every 6 - 8 years. The brits let all that technical capability wither and could not do it again right now. But if someone was willing its still theoretically possible. Just takes total alignment between government and private.
- wmf 1y agoThe Texas grid is stable now that they added batteries BTW.
- jeffbee 1y ago> One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big) Sort of a baffling statement. Quebec is gigantic. It would be a top-20 nation, by extent, if it were a nation.
- jedberg 1y agoQuebec has a lot of empty land. But it does not have a lot of buildable land near plentiful power, super fast internet, and highly skilled technical workers, which are all things you need to build a datacenter.
- debian3 1y agoThere is tons of big power producing electric dams in the middle of nowhere (north of Québec province). It’s also cold most of the year. As far as I know, datacenter doesn’t mean tons of technical workers (except during the building phase). Bringing fiber would not be impossible.
- tw04 1y ago> Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones. They aren’t big on deregulation at all. They’re big on selective regulation. They’re also big on killing any power project that isn’t oil or coal. https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-renewable-energy-transportation-8578da8b985b6d4eef20ec4d85c21b5d https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-renewable-ene... We are in for a painful lesson on why China’s investment in renewables wasn’t just good for their ecology.
- boredatoms 1y agoThere are hydrogen pipelines in texas. There is at least one DC provider using that for power instead of the grid
- jdboyd 1y agoIn my part of PA there are 3 in the process of going in nearby. I think the largest of the 3 is "only" 828 megawatts though. One of the others is supposed to be 300MW, and I'm not sure about the 3rd. There is another group talking about 3 more campuses with a combined power budget of 1.3GW about 55 miles from here. But then while we don't have cheap land, we do have nuclear and hydroelectric in the area, so I guess the makes it attractive.
- jdboyd 1y agoIn m
- sghiassy 1y agoCurious what you think about Oregon. Has a lot of hydroelectric and the nights get super-cold, so you could open the roof for free ventilation
- bob1029 1y agoI think Texas (ERCOT) is a terrible option these days. Meta recently made a fantastic choice by picking Louisiana for their new monster. The MISO grid tends to be cheaper and less volatile than ERCOT.
- niemandhier 1y agoEnergy efficient computing is a very exciting field. I hope it will get more attention driven by these economic constraints. As a short teaser: Landauers principle suggests that the energy required to erase one bit off information is bounded from below by k_BTln(2). This could lead us down a path towards reversible computing, to avoid energy costs for deleting information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
- wmf 1y agoThe work started around 10-15 years ago and is now largely done. Many people confuse large absolute numbers like 1 kW with inefficiency but today's GPUs/TPUs are close to the practical efficiency limit with today's 3 nm technology.
- estimator7292 1y agoI think it's mostly because laypeople think that all heat is wasted heat. Most people are pretty surprised to learn that there's a fundamental energy cost to flip a bit and that there even is a lower limit to the amount of heat generated by a bit flip.
- beeflet 1y agoI think the problem is that you can't get the chips hot enough to drive an efficient industrial process unless you are using GaN or something. The carnot cycle on waste heat is bad
- adrianN 1y agoThey might be close to the limit for what they do (I don’t know), but are they close to the limit of what we need them for?
- 31b3r3t7 1y agoWhy Nvidia is desperate to get back to China: https://youtu.be/DMVAqABLkxk?si=FsyHMGmGEVPUGAot https://youtu.be/DMVAqABLkxk?si=FsyHMGmGEVPUGAot
- tehjoker 1y agoWhat is the point of all this? Why are we using so much power for hallucinated google search?
- MadnessASAP 1y agoBecause, for the time being, people are buying it.
- iainctduncan 1y agoWell .... investors are funding it. Take those away and nowhere near enough people want the price on the tin.
- tehjoker 1y agoEven if that were true, that wouldn't be a useful justification. People buy drugs because they are addictive, it's not a rational decision about costs and benefits. Externalities are almost not at all considered in the contract here.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- starchild3001 1y agoMy hunch: we’ll see three things happen in parallel - AI backend providers vertically integrating into energy production (like xAI’s gas plants, or Meta’s local generation experiments), - renewed interest in genuinely efficient computing paradigms (e.g. reversible/approximate computing, analog accelerators), - a political battle over whether AI workloads deserve priority access to power vs. EVs, homes, or manufacturing, alongside an increase in energy prices. You need cheap, reliable power + political/regulatory willingness + cooling. That’s a very short list of geographies. And even then, power buildout timelines (whether nuclear, gas, or grid-scale solar+batteries) move at "utility speed", which is decades, not quarters. That doesn’t match the cadence of GPU product launches.
- pbd 1y agoThe timing mismatch is crucial - data centers can be built in 12-18 months, but new power generation takes 5-10 years minimum. We're essentially trying to scale AI demand faster than energy infrastructure can physically respond. This creates interesting arbitrage opportunities in power-rich but compute-poor regions.
- blackoil 1y agoRemove restrictions on solar import from China. 62 GW may sound a large number, but China added 277GW solar in just 2024. They have the surplus capacity and hence cheapest price.
- adriand 1y agoChina installed 3 gigawatts of solar power every day in May: equivalent to building one coal-fired power plant every 8 hours. They are so far ahead of the US on renewables now that even if Trump had not sold out the future of the country to the fossil fuel industry, the US would have been hard-pressed to catch up.
- XorNot 1y agoThis is honestly one of the stupidest things about this sort of policy: solar panels last 20 years and China can't take them away once you have them. If you're doing something much more valuable with the power, then buying a lot of PV from China makes sense. If you think the panels are being unfairly subsidized then buying a lot of PV from China is effectively having the Chinese government pay you to have cheap power. There's an enormous difference between being dependent on short term consumable resources,.and acquiring multidecadel productive assets. The US at all points seems to not understand it's relationship with China at all.
- Panzer04 1y agoMost people are economically illiterate and don't understand what subsidies actually imply. They literally only "hurt" you if you have the local industry to harm to begin with. Otherwise, if someone else is paying the subsidy, it gives you a good for cheaper than you could have had otherwise. The current admin just turns this up to 11 with their ideologically driven nonsense.
- xbmcuser 1y agoI got down voted when I said China is likely to win the AI race as they are also targeting the other big cost of computing power/energy on another thread. Today solar + BESS is cheaper than coal where as costs for both keep decreasing each year.
- mullingitover 1y agoOne really interesting strategy the US could pursue here would be to heavily tariff solar[1] and just randomly attack wind projects[2]. Just completely self-own itself on the two cheapest energy sources. It wouldn't make any sense, but it would be provocative, really drive engagement. [1] https://seia.org/news/solar-tariff-impacts/ https://seia.org/news/solar-tariff-impacts/ [2] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/31/nx-s1-5522943/trump-offshore-wind-energy-ports https://www.npr.org/2025/08/31/nx-s1-5522943/trump-offshore-...
- beeflet 1y agoMaybe the tariff could encourage local manufacturing of solar? I have no idea, but I suppose that our local manufacturing could be getting killed by economies of scale abroad. Or I am overthinking it and solar is something that (D) politicians support so the (R) president tautologically must oppose it. Therefore we must not have nice things
- downrightmike 1y agoWe have tried locally, with huge government backing, but that failed. But since it was an Obama initiative, a new attempt will never be tried. Farmers make more money from wind turbines on their land than their crop. https://ambrook.com/offrange/farm-finance/there-will-be-wind https://ambrook.com/offrange/farm-finance/there-will-be-wind And that is stable money, works without rain, which crops don't.
- bsder 1y ago> Maybe the tariff could encourage local manufacturing of solar? That's what tariffs do ... if you leave them in place for extended periods of time. The problem is that nobody is going to bet their business on what the tariffs will be tomorrow when it could be 10x or zero. Businesses are just going to stop and hold their breath until Trump goes away.
- mullingitover 1y agoMy guess is that the US is sliding into the pattern of ‘corrupt, resource cursed petrostate’ and all the dysfunction that comes with that. What will happen is whatever maximizes fossil fuel revenues, and lots of shiny distractions to prevent this from being scrutinized.
- orbisvicis 1y agoAh, finally an acknowledgement that the melting 12VHPWR connectors short-circuiting Nvidia's top-of-the-line hardware, the RTX 4090 and 5090, may finally have economic ramifications. Heh.
- worik 1y agoQuestion: Is piping data a long distance more cost effective than energy? I would have thought so. If so building data centres near hydro or geothermal plants (I'm from New Zealand where we have a lot of both) would make sense
- wmf 1y agoYes, but I think all of that cheap power has been used up already in the US.