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I live in Maine. Commercial power is crazy expensive. I don't know why you would build an AI datacenter here in the first place. As an obsessive self-hoster,
by 9cb14c1ec0 6mo ago
I live in Maine. Commercial power is crazy expensive. I don't know why you would build an AI datacenter here in the first place. As an obsessive self-hoster, I've researched building one, and there is no universe in which it makes sense. New Hampshire and Massachusetts are so nearby latency-wise.
- dpe82 6mo agoPower is not the most expensive part of data center lifetime cost; especially these days when you're filling them with several billion dollars of nvidia chips. It's still an important consideration of course, but not the only one.
- jeffbee 6mo agoI don't know if that's really true. Given realistic life cycles of equipment (~10 years, not 3 as commonly believed) the operating power is going to be 75-80% of the TCO, or more.
- jsnell 6mo agoI don't see how that number could possibly be realistic. A H100 cost 30k when new, and uses 500W of power. 500W for a year is about 4500kWh, which at $0.10/kWh is $450/year if run at full utilization (unrealistic). TCO of an AI data center should be entirely dominated by capex depreciation.
- _2d30 6mo agoIn fairness your calculation looks at the most expensive element of the DC but ignores all of the associated parts required to utilize the H100: CPU, memory, cooling, etc. No to say that that flips the calculation (I don't have the answer), but it does leave a lot of power out.
- dpe82 6mo agoLet's be generous and pretend the rest of the hardware is free but double the energy budget of the H100 to account for all of it along with cooling. You're still at only $1k/yr; $10k over 10 years, or 25% of the TCO (ignoring all other costs).
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- jeffbee 6mo agoAs has been repeatedly demonstrated[1], it is the presence of new, large consumers that drives down the cost of bulk power by amortizing the infrastructure investments. Maine voters are, of course, notorious bozos in this field, having voted in a plebiscite in 2021 to cancel the link to Quebec Hydro, which was already substantially completed. 1: For example LBNL's latest banger: Factors influencing recent trends in retail electricity prices in the United States, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040619025000612 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...
- nutjob2 6mo agoWhy on earth did they do that? Linking to a power station you didn't have to build seems like a no brainer. Was the deal that bad?
- rangerelf 6mo agoDo you have any links to support this? Because the commonality of all arguments _against_ has been that they make water and power crazy expensive for everyone that has to live close to the newly opened datacenters, while the DC operator enjoys subsidized land use tax, water and power.
- jph00 6mo ago"already substantially completed" isn't accurate. $450m of the eventual $1.65b cost had been spent at that point - so less than half.
- bsimpson 6mo agoI know little about this region. Why would it be unreasonably more expensive to build on one side of the state line than another?
- culi 6mo agoThey are very dependent on natural gas and they also heavy environmental protections/pollution regulation that makes it hard to build stuff like pipelines and, hence, makes electricity more expensive compared to states with less environmental protections.
- kube-system 6mo agoI don't know about this particular situation (NH and MA seem to have expensive power as well), but you can have significantly different costs on one side of the line or the other for regulatory reasons. State regulations can affect the cost of business significantly, and electricity is no exception.
- bsimpson 6mo agoI'm from Nevada. Very aware that California has more regulation (and hence more cost than us), but know little about the regional cost differences between Maine and Massachusetts.
- pj_mukh 6mo agoFascinating. First you NIMBY the power, then you cite the power shortages to NIMBY the data centers. Win. Win.
- kube-system 6mo agoThere's a lot more that contributes to power costs than NIMBYism.
- yxhuvud 6mo agoAbundant access to a source of cooling can help offset high grid prices. Well places centres can a ton of money that way.
- kube-system 6mo agoEven in inefficient data centers, cooling is a minority of the power expense. Chasing a few percent of better cooling efficiency at the expense of a few percent more expensive power is a net negative. Cheap power is much more cost effective than the smaller efficiency bump you get from cold weather -- and you can also get both by locating in the midwest or northwest. Hyperscalers build here for these reasons.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- lithos 6mo agoCooling is a very variable 30% cost. (IE: Iron Mountain's underground Datacenter with a flooded reservoir in the mine gets to brag about 5% of its cost being cooling, as the most extreme low end). Up north comes with it's own issues for Datacenters. Winter low humidity (kills cable/wire insulation), chiller freeze protection can get pretty complex to set up properly (with failures causing complete destruction of some components that will need multi-ton cranes to replace), and multi-year construction projects are harder with real winters. Sure it's all perfectly manageable engineering wise, but why bother. There's probably easier green energy credits down south, given the current viability of solar.