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How AI labs are solving the power problem
- Symmetry 10mo agoI found Boom's pivot much less confusing after this article.
- leetrout 10mo agoFor those like me that are missing context: https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-power https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...
- Aurornis 10mo agoBoom’s pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers wasn’t surprising when data center deployments started using turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking point. What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
- Symmetry 10mo agoI had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in airplanes were more different from the turbines in power plants than they actually are.
- Aurornis 10mo agoBoom doesn’t actually have a turbine yet. Their design partner publicly pulled out of their contract with Boom a while ago. Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It’s one of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever they’re doing in public is just PR right now. Until they actually produce something (other than a prototype that doesn’t resemble their production goals using other people’s parts) their PR releases don’t mean a whole lot.
- quickthrowman 10mo ago> What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all. My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”
- torginus 10mo agoWhat I didn't get is afair Boom doesn't build engines, aren't they using some old 50s-60s fighter jet engines?
- goda90 10mo agoPower problem: solved Natural Gas supply problem: worsened Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened
- einrealist 10mo agoThe word 'pollution' appears exactly one time in this entire thing, the word 'community' or 'communities' never.
- quikoa 10mo agoThis website appears to be very AI heavy in articles. I think it's fair to say these articles are biased because of that.
- wyldfire 10mo agoThe only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do, in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look like the most affordable option, because they're not.
- einrealist 10mo agoTrue. The same is true for nuclear energy. I never heard of a nuclear power plant that did not receive substantial subsidies throughout lifetime. Not to forget the nuclear fuel and the efforts required to create it and later to store it.
- eszed 10mo agoA carbon tax, you say? 9 out of 10 economists agree, and dozens of voters. Dozens! [That read as snark, didn't it? Sorry. I absolutely, completely, 100% agree with everything you say.]
- protimewaster 10mo agoYeah, that headline made me think "Oh good, there's some solution on the horizon that won't require absurd amounts of electricity." Not so.
- pingou 10mo agoWhat about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?
- thunderbird120 10mo agoTakes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front investment, and requires a lot more land. The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
- memoriuaysj 10mo agoland. compute what surface you need for 1 GW of solar
- Aurornis 10mo agoReciprocating natural gas engines can be moved from [concrete] pad to pad and be up and running in under 24 hours. The portable turbines take longer but they’re still fast. Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.
- condensedcrab 10mo agoThe density required for solar is also much lower - the coordination between different land parcels and routing power and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem gas turbines.
- O5vYtytb 10mo agoHow many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days. [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-storage-system-goes-into-operation-in-Australia-10510988.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...
- thatfrenchguy 10mo agoOur kids are not going to be happy we spun up more CO2 generation for this.
- memoriuaysj 10mo agotheir uploaded minds will enjoy the infinite AI slop though
- linsomniac 10mo agoI hear they LOVE Sanctuary Moon.
- Apreche 10mo ago> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Citation needed.
- Aurornis 10mo agoThis is coming from a group that does analysis on the semiconductor and cloud industries and provided very expensive access to their models and info. They are the citation.
- Apreche 10mo agoSo I guess it’s not a bubble then since these companies are raking in the big revenues? Or maybe they are counting all those circular investments as revenues somehow?
- airstrike 10mo agoRevenue isn't profit, and the presence or absence of either, separately or jointly, isn't sufficient to determine there is a bubble.
- throw10920 10mo agoYou can make a lot of money but still be in a bubble if speculation is significantly higher than (actual or potential) revenue. I think that's most people's assumption. It's not that AI is worthless, but that it's significantly less valuable than investors are betting on.
- dannersy 10mo agoI mean, if so then they are lying through their teeth.
- Aurornis 10mo agoBased on what? I’m inclined to trust a well known industry analyst over an HN comment with no basis.
- pdpi 10mo agoPart of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W. So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
- saagarjha 10mo agoThat’s about the energy a laptop or two uses at full tilt.
- roflmaostc 10mo agotry to calculate 12312312.123213 * 123123.3123123 A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human. It's all about the task, humans are specialized too. EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.
- FergusArgyll 10mo agoYou can't compare a training run that produces a file which can be run forever after to a human day
- 10mo ago
- dkobia 10mo agoInteresting choice of names: "Solar Turbines" - a wholly owned Caterpillar subsidiary that designs and manufactures industrial gas turbines. That said, it is all pretty impressive.
- sameesh 10mo ago"xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines." So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel. Got it.
- miltonlost 10mo agoAnd all without the proper permits! Using 35 generators when they were only allowed 15! Yay! So glad we're allowing AI companies to break law after law after law to not be able to reason logically the basic Towers of Hanoi. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-natural-gas-generators-at-memphis-data-center/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
- thrance 10mo ago> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive. xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines. Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything else.
- sam-cop-vimes 10mo agoI'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles - their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as they see it. The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
- miltonlost 10mo ago"Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but rather sociopathic. https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-natural-gas-generators-at-memphis-data-center/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na... 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...
- oklahomasports 10mo agoYouve posted the same think like 4 times now
- trickyager 10mo ago
- bob1029 10mo ago> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts. This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.
- jsnell 10mo agoI mean, the claim is certainly nonsensical in the sense that this isn't something Wärtsilä just "realized". They have been in the power plant business for decades. In the oldest financials they have online (the annual report for year 2000) their power plant sales are larger than their marine engine sales. Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists. But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?
- g8oz 10mo agoThey likely use multiple engines.
- codingdave 10mo agoThis is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money." It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.
- Aurornis 10mo ago> This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money." Like every other industry in the world? I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.
- roxolotl 10mo agoThe difference is they are new. It’s not rational but people on the whole generally are ok with the status quo of how the sausage is made largely because they don’t really think about it. But new systems being spun up provide an entry point for a discussion. Ideally that discussion can then be widened and open up an opportunity for wider scale change. Or nothing happens and it all becomes the new status quo which most don’t think about again.
- TSiege 10mo agoThe difference is that the food industry at least feeds me and a house provides me shelter. The people in charge of building AI data centers intend to replace all labor in using my own and leave me begging for peanuts, while also making energy and many goods more expensive and ruining the environment
- TSiege 10mo agoFYI Fairly certain this account is a bot. Acct created in 2023 and has 36k karma
- kortilla 9mo ago
- teknopaul 10mo agoEconomic * need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid. *greed. We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is anything but a distribution of income problem.
- biddit 10mo agoThe dialog around AI resource use is frustratingly inane, because the benefits are never discussed in the same context. LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created: > AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts. Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
- zzzeek 10mo ago> However, AI infrastructure cannot wait for the grid’s multiyear transmission upgrades. An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Getting a 400 MW datacenter online even six months earlier is worth billions. Economic need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid. The industry is already searching for new solutions. wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with that. This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
- geetee 10mo agoTitle should be "AI labs are raping the planet"
- a1371 10mo agoThe problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not going to be flexible enough to take new demand. It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
- symbogra 10mo agoReally cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically. I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
- qchris 10mo agoI often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative. > Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive. > Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early! The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost. [1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ [2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-facility-in-south-memphis-gets-stronger/ https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-... [3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit-over-air-pollution-memphis-data-center-filed-behalf https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...
- mikelitoris 10mo agoMore appropriate word is “sly” not “clever”.
- bugglebeetle 10mo agoIt’s called “Semi” analysis for a reason. Dylan Patel is the Jim Cramer of industry reporting for this sector.
- roxolotl 10mo agoIt’s cute they describe this as a solution to _the_ power problem. It’s a solution to _their_ power problem. We have a grid problem. This massive amount of investment would be an incredible time to do something about it. Instead we’ve got an administration hostile to modern energy solutions and an industry hostile to everyone. Really depressing to see all this money go up in smoke in such a massive short sighted rush.
- josefritzishere 10mo agoTLDR: They're not reducing power consumption, they're just also using gas now. Buckle up for higher prices, the AI slop factory needs more power.
- bespokedevelopr 10mo agoI previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side. My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry. I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands. Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now. On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies. As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
- trhway 10mo agoso we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end - residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago). That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration wave.
- tehjoker 10mo agoIsn't spinning up huge amounts of power on inefficient engines going to make climate impacts worse?
- g8oz 10mo ago>>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines. These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending. xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment! https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/ https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
- mhb 10mo agoWhy is the skin tone of the residents of the affected community relevant?
- ladidahh 10mo agoIn the US, we have a living history of discriminatory policies based on race https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shadows-redlinings-mark-on-memphis https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis
- mhb 10mo agoYeah. I've heard about it. So this wouldn't be a problem if it affected a different group of people?
- twerka-stonk 10mo agoI enjoyed the detailed article despite how depressing it is. I never can blame business for finding a market-palatable solution. However, it is worth saying that xAI’s “solution” was illegal, unhealthy for the local constituents, and stinks of corruption, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-data-center-gas-turbines-memphis/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da....
- AkelaA 10mo agoI think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.
- cl0ckt0wer 10mo agoThey are already power-constrained. Any efficiency improvements would immediately be allocated to more AI.
- redox99 10mo agoIf you make it more efficient, then you train it for longer or make it larger. You're not going to just idle your GPUs. And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's going to use your model if someone else has a better model.
- inkysigma 10mo agoWhat makes you think that the entire process isn't being made more efficient? There are entire papers dedicated to pulling out more FLOPs from GPUs so that less energy is being wasted on simply moving memory around. Of course, there's also inference side optimizations like speculative decoding and MoE. Some of these make the training process more expensive. The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.
- siliconc0w 10mo agoKinda proving that these are a bad deal for communities - very few jobs and tax revenues, but enjoy the increased asthma and cancer we all get to pay for.
- on_the_grind 10mo ago[dead]
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoTL;DR by saying fuck environment
- libraryofbabel 10mo agoDoes anyone know a really good source for basic information estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong reactions that tend to cloud the facts. Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate? Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)
- lefra 10mo agoUS grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find. So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?globe=1&globeRotation=44.76%2C-103.57&globeZoom=1.66 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546 For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable). https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-centre-electricity-consumption-by-sensitivity-case-2020-2035 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
- libraryofbabel 10mo agoThanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing. 1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.) Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.
- seydor 10mo ago... and, all this for what ?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- dzonga 10mo agothe rather uninformed question I had: but answered in comments below was why not solar ? Yeah Hydrocarbons have no competition if you have to deploy power quickly 1.2GW is a small turbine - compared to the land & battery needed for Solar. how about Gas ? if you're building in the middle of nowhere ? & there's no gas lines ?
- cl0ckt0wer 10mo agoIf you just paid a jillion dollars for a shiny new AI datacenter, would you be ok with just running it during the day?
- pastel8739 10mo agoTesla is a battery company
- klooney 10mo agoBattery capacity is still better at short duration shifting- milliseconds, minutes- all night is tough. The xAI mega pack can only do 4 hours according to the article.
- phil21 10mo agoSo all the predictable arguments aside... Why is no one talking about the "other grid" capacity here? Natural gas at this scale cannot be delivered by truck. It's piped in direct from fields, typically. When do we run out of natural gas "grid" capacity in these locations? I can't imagine we're that overbuilt compared to the electrical grid itself? The big freeze in Texas is a recent example of the natural gas grid having localized "brownouts" due to a few factors - one of which being the demand of all the natural gas peakers trying to fire at once. Seems like this is the next infrastructure piece to have a supply crunch to me? There are places (North Dakota) so contranstrained by capacity to deliver gas to the "grid" that they simply flare it off because it's cheaper to pay the government to do that vs. lay pipe. This implies to me that natural gas is about to become more valuable.
- credit_guy 10mo agoHere's my guess: there are lots of datacenters being built in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois [1]. Also in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Utah. I think the first 5 states have this in common: there are lots of coal burning power plants that were shut down, but can be restarted and hooked to the grid on a relatively short notice. The grid is also quite good in this region. In Texas, it is likely that new power can be generated with a combination of solar, wind, gas, and fast permitting. I don't have an explanation for Georgia. For Arizona, and perhaps Nevada and Utah too, I think it is likely to be solar. [1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/data-center-growth-map-states https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/data-center-growth-map-stat...
- aschla 10mo agoDon't know about the others, but Illinois permanently shut down (and demolished or repurposed the land) the majority of its coal power plants over the past couple decades. Illinois gets about half its power from nuclear (we have 6 plants and 11 reactors), followed by natural gas at around 20%, and then about equal amounts of coal and wind, at around 10-15%. So Illinois is actually a pretty decent place to build datacenters, from a clean power generation perspective. https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=IL https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=IL
- ptx 9mo agoThere's not a single mention of pollution or clean energy or the environment in the entire article. Presumably the regulatory requirements for these generators are less stringent than for proper power plants, so the costs are pushed onto the rest of society (having to deal with the environmental impact) while Microsoft et al. keep the profits?
- deflator 9mo agoCool article. It's pretty weird that the writer seems to attribute all decisions by xAI to Mr. Musk personally. I doubt he is closely involved in such technical projects.