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Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o( https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-ter
by zepearl 2mo ago
Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o(
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-on-natural-gas-power-plants-not-tesla-solar-panels/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...
- deepsun 2mo agoDon't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it. Especially if he buys from his own company.
- nielsbot 2mo agoand would be cheaper in the long run? or maybe they could even do solar + storage. i guess even at this stage “gas is easier” is still winning…
- dgellow 2mo agoYou’re talking about one of the most hated person on hearth with one of the worst reputation. The literal Nazi salute guy. I don’t think he cares much about positive PR like that
- legulere 2mo agoThe problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well
- sylos 2mo agoRemember when they said they couldnzt electrify the grid for ev's so they opted to just not do anything with ev's. Now datacenters are getting rushed in so fast and breaking the grids so hard they can illegally running generators
- throwaway473825 2mo agoEVs aren't popular in the US due to the Republicans being beholden to oil and gas interests and the Democrats to unions. The grid was just an excuse.
- watwut 2mo agoBoth sides! We need to make up democrats against EV, because conservatives are!
- throwaway473825 2mo agoOne side being worse isn't an excuse for the other being bad. Regarding EVs, the US started to fall behind in 2019, and the gap has only continued to widen, regardless of administration: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales-share?facet=none&country=OWID_WRL~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales-share?... Electric buses should be a no-brainer, yet New York comes last among US states in a recent market survey: https://theicct.org/publication/zero-emission-bus-and-truck-market-us-q1-2026-jul26/ https://theicct.org/publication/zero-emission-bus-and-truck-...
- skywhopper 2mo agoThey could (and should be required to) build out their own solar/wind/battery infra as part of standing up a new datacenter. So much money is being wasted on poisoning our air and further enriching the richest companies in the history of the world.
- int_19h 2mo ago"Fast enough" for what?
- chaos_emergent 2mo agoIt’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high. Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity. The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure. For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
- smallerize 2mo agoNatural gas generators are also a supply bottleneck. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threatens-natural-gas-fired-power-expansion/ https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threat...
- dathinab 2mo ago_decent, clean_ gas generators have a bottleneck cheap, dirty, loud "tbh. shouldn't exist" kind fo gas generators are far more available and what is widely used but also huge part of the solar supply bottleneck is artificial due to import regulations from china and both the US and EU having failed to secure meaningful domestic solar supply chains.
- cbmuser 2mo ago»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.« No, it's just physics.
- dathinab 2mo agono, it's not physics but politics which are the problem here
- 2mo ago
- bensyverson 2mo agoI would assume that training pales in comparison to inference when it comes to energy use, taking into account the number of inference users
- aaron_m04 2mo agoI wouldn't assume that. I would wish to see numbers on that first.
- snippylongpossu 2mo agoElon has aligned with the hard-right. He'd rather own the libs and hurt the global south than do that.
- cbmuser 2mo ago»Don't understand why.« Because you cannot turn a large datacenter with thousands of aggregates, power supplies and so on off and on like a toaster.
- XorNot 2mo agoDatacenters literally have UPS power supplies to let them gracefully shutdown and start up. A 4 hour grid battery and a weather forecast would easily let a training run follow energy availability.
- turbert 2mo agowhen the GPU capex overshadows everything else your idle hardware is burning enormous amounts of money
- podocarp 2mo agoAre the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?
- XorNot 2mo agoBut that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability. AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
- deepsun 2mo agoI totally can. And if it's powered by solar (low inertia) there's less obligations to supply side, solar panels will just get warmer a tiny bit.
- skywhopper 2mo agoBatteries exist, and are getting better all the time.
- jiggawatts 2mo agoThe reasons are: - Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it. - Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc. - Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production. Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types. They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.
- 8note 2mo ago> Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. these data centers dont care that much about network throughput - you can sneakernet the training set into place and inference on the text isnt that taxing on the network there's a reason the ai datacenters are being built wherever the power is cheapest and theres the lowest regulations. there's no real physical location requirement, so you could actually put them close to the solar power generation
- jiggawatts 2mo agoSolar works as well as it does only because we’ve spread it out and connected it to a grid. When it is overcast in one spot it is sunny elsewhere. That “elsewhere” has to be far enough away to get different weather. This means a grid capable of transferring 100% of the needed power. So even if you plopped a new DC in the middle of a field of panels you’d still need a ~1 GA grid connection… or a battery array many times the size as you’d otherwise need just to cover night time usage.
- int_19h 2mo agoAll those companies are sitting on literally hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. If they need this so badly, let them build the connection and other infrastructure.
- CodesInChaos 2mo agoWhen you spend many billions buying GPUs, you want to maximize utilization, and not turn them off during the night.
- pseudohadamard 2mo agoWhen you spend many millions buying a government, you want to maximize your return on that investment, not just play by the rules like everyone else.
- CodesInChaos 2mo agoYou could argue that Musk spent 44 billions buying that.
- ecshafer 2mo agoI don't see why this isn't obvious. Terafab is a FAB not a datacenter.
- noosphr 2mo agoHospitals can also just run on the sunny days. Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- skrause 2mo agoIn modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days. There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
- noosphr 2mo agoIf you run a washing machine sure. If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.
- throwaway473825 2mo agoBuilding gas power plants that run only a few weeks per year is very expensive. Just compare prices in Germany (gas) with China (coal) or Finland (nuclear). A more economical way would be to build nuclear power plants that power electrolyzers most of the time and provide power to the grid when necessary. In the US, gas power plants make more sense due to ridiculously cheap gas, but even then the capacity factor of those power plants is much higher than 10%.
- sensanaty 2mo agoOr we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
- psolidgold 2mo agoComparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think? Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind. I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
- dathinab 2mo agoIdk. about any specific data center but many of this data centers aren't for AI training / making advancements on the AI race. They have sufficient resources for that already AFIK. They are to run AI, so that the 100th app can force an AI agent down your throat weather your want or not /s. (Or in more optimistic words, so that the AI adoption can spread as fast as their is demand.)
- redwood 2mo agoInference almost certainly dominates training workloads at this point and that can only be expected to continue to become more lopsided
- culi 2mo agoAlso an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027... That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
- dathinab 2mo agoand they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones) A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far) Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a data center of a super computer in the mittle of a city and there where no sound issues at all (through yes it was a special case in many ways). I mean yes, it costs more and many well established companies for high quality gas turbines are booked out. Still using the kind of gas turbines which can bring back literal acid rain shouldn't be an option at all. Lets also not speak about the environmental/health damage the production of the natural gas through fracking does. Which bring us to a common nonsense argument, people going on and on about hoe economically expensive/harmful climate protection is, but totally missing that many oft he circumvented laws are not for climate protection but are for environmental protection for the sake of humans health. To make thinks worse most of this data centers seems to be more about making money, then being in any way relevant for winning any AI race...
- wolvoleo 2mo agoThey probably take portable ones so they can claim it's not a permanent installation and they can skip a lot of planning permission that way.
- pseudohadamard 2mo agoProblem is all the (relatively) efficient and (relatively) quiet turbines have long since been snapped up, so the AI sloppers have to go with inefficient, noisy ones for the foreseeable future. And given that no-one knows when the AI bubble will finally burst, no manufacturer wants to sink hundreds of millions into new plant to produce turbines in a year or two when the sloppers may be barely alive on taxpayer cash injections.