3 ms·
20KW? Wow. That's a lot of power. Is that figure per hour?
by neya 8mo ago
20KW? Wow. That's a lot of power. Is that figure per hour?
- ipython 8mo agoIt’s 20kW for as long as you can afford the power bill
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- ai-christianson 8mo agoIf you run it for an hour, yes.
- neya 8mo agoI asked because that's the average power consumption of an average household in the US per day. So, if that figure is per hour, that's equivalent to one household worth of power consumption per hour...which is a lot.
- jodrellblank 8mo agoConsumption of a house per day is measured in kiloWatt-hours (an amount of power like litres of water), not kiloWatts (a flow of power like 1 litre per second of water). 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.
- neya 8mo agoThanks!
- cortesoft 8mo agoI think you are confusing KW (kilowatt) with KWH (kilowatt hour). A KW is a unit of power while a KWH is a unit of energy. Power is a measure of energy transferred in an amount of time, which is why you rate an electronic device’s energy usage using power; it consumes energy over time. In terms of paying for electricity, you care about the total energy consumed, which is why your electric bill is denominated in KWH, which is the amount of energy used if you use one kilowatt of power for one hour.
- mediaman 8mo agoOthers clarified the kW versus kWh, but to re-visit the comparison to a household: One household uses about 30 kWh per day. 20 kW * 24 = 480 kWh per day for the server. So you're looking at one server (if parent's 20kW number is accurate - I see other sources saying even 25kW) consuming 16 households worth of energy. For comparison, a hair dryer uses around 1.5 kW of energy, which is just below the rating for most US home electrical circuits. This is something like 13 hair dryers going on full blast.
- seaal 8mo agoWhich honestly doesn't sound that bad given how many users one server is able to serve.
- mycall 8mo agoAt least with GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, I gather most of the AI inference isn't rendering cat videos but mostly useful work.. so I don't feel tooo bad about 16 households worth of energy.
- wongarsu 8mo agoTo be fair, this is 16 households of electrical energy. The average household uses about as much electrical energy as it uses energy in form of natural gas (or butane or fuel oil, depending on what they use). And then roughly as much gasoline as they use electricity. So really more like 5 households of energy. And that's just your direct energy use, not accounting for all the products including food consumed in the average household.
- taneq 8mo agoAh yes, like those EV chargers that are rated at X kWh/hour.
- t0mas88 8mo agoYou would hope that an EV reporting x kWh/hour considers the charge curve when charging for an hour. Then it makes sense to report that instead of the peak kW rating. But reality is that they just report the peak kW rating as the "kWh/hour" :-(
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- fodkodrasz 8mo agoWhat do you mean by "per hour"? Watt is a measure of power, that is a rate: Joule/second, [energy/time] > The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3.[1][2][3] It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt
- ddalex 8mo ago20 kWh per hour