The AI data center narrative is the perfect storm:
First most of the data center build out is happening in areas that have had little other opportunity so local resistance is muted. Abilene, Texas is referenced and is the kind of place my grandfather would lovingly say is where you go to learn to be a “dirt farmer”
Second, every environmentalist in the US is fighting 100 different battles with the most anti-regulation, pro-energy administration in decades (ever?) and has limited bandwidth.
And third, the AI narrative around national security, longevity, and super-intelligence-enabled abundance provides massive national coverage - the implications being that AI will solve any environmental and or human economic disasters that they enable.
The Pacific Ocean is a bit of an exageration here.
There isn't a single battery this big today, but if batteries continue following the exponential growth curve they've been on then there probably will be in the next decade or so (if not sooner).
"Environmentalists" is a large, diverse group and nuclear energy has been a controversial topic splitting the group for decades.
Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.
Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.
The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.
Last year, China installed 1.5GW of nuclear and 300GW of renewables. China's total coal use decreased as they decommissioned and under-utilized more coal than they installed.
This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.
It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.
Nuclear is useful but it's hard to see it as a panacea. Renewable energy on the other hand is hard to beat. The economics of it keeps getting better, and previous estimates of the lifecycle of things like solar was grossly misrepresented.
Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.
Yes, and that dates from the era when everyone thought that a "nuclear winter" (from an exchange of nuclear bombs between the US and USSR) was a more immediate risk than a long slow problem of climate change. That's what the French government carried out a terrorist attack against Greenpeace in New Zealand for: the Rainbow Warrior was protesting against French nuclear weapons testing.
Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?
Please. Show me a nuke that was under 10 billion over budget and less than 20 years late.
Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.
If you look at how much time and money the French poured into their nuclear plant construction project (and several other pre-decommissioning issues) things look rather less rosy.
Also, it was a very high priority for France - keep in mind Napoleon's quote about the relative importance of moral and material.
More critically: The logic of "The French did {extremely complex thing} fairly well in the late 1900's, therefore we can also" is very similar to the logic of "SpaceX designs and operates reusable rockets with hundreds of launches per year and no failures, therefore we can also". NO, sorry, you are just fantasizing about rocket science somehow being easy for you. SpaceX has lots of highly motivated would-be competitors - many of them far better financed than SpaceX was - but the hard fact is that zero of those can actually do what SpaceX is doing.
Because it’s a dangerous technology where profit over security can have severe consequences.
Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.
>Because it’s a dangerous technology where profit over security can have severe consequences.
Yeah it's far better to have power plants kill a steady stream of people, but in a banal way that's hard to attribute, like coal power plants causing lung cancer.
No, but hydroelectric works pretty well. There's a reason they recycle aluminum, etc. (power-hungry industries—crypto-mining, ha ha) along the Columbia River, etc.
So build your data centers there. No reason to choose the least evil.
Even if modern renewables and batteries kill the need for future nuclear power plants, that doesn't excuse the consequences of decades of burning fossil fuels because environmental groups fought against nuclear power altogether.
We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc.
The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
China invested hugely into renewable energy. Their grid is strong. Ours is falling apart and our renewable energy contracts keep getting shredded. Gas powered data centers is beyond dystopian
That doom take has a few roots in truth, but it is mostly false. Our grid for the most part is very good and improving. A lot of the gloom is it is good for today, but here is why we are trying to expand it anyway - that is the gloom itself is helpful to get the needed changes made.
There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.
If you're worried abour grid health, how is adding distributed generation colocated with new loads dystopian?
Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.
Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.
And the sad part is that ai would be a perfect fit for intermittent energy sources: run inference 24/7 (on whatever you can muster, even if it's fossil it simply does not consume all that much compared to training) and over-build training to achieve whatever total throughout you need in time of energy abundance. How heavy would CO2 pricing have to be to make the market do this instead of the exact opposite?
What would be the economy of these data centers if they would run using power source with say, for example 25% capacity factor? What is the capital expenditure of a data center? What is the yearly operational expenditure of a data center?
I found that a 100 MW datacenter can cost roughly $3.35 billion, with a significant portion going to high-end GPUs like the B100 or H100. For electricity, 100 MW data center can incur annual power costs ranging from $41 million to over $131 million, depending on regional energy prices.
Very quick Googling suggests Wired’s estimate would be ~1.9% of US emissions.
AI data center investment is, at core, a bet on increasing the productivity of labor. That’s what businesses will pay for, and what will earn the big money.
If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate.
Problem is climate and ecosystem doesn’t give a fuck about some notional productivity or carbon intensity just the absolute number of pollution molecules going into the air
The "climate" cares little about carbon intensity of labor or dollars. It cares about absolute tons of green house gases in the atmostphere and if you use more to produce more you still use more.
You should always assume these that benefit most from the technological forefront think they can outrun the output of climate change or any of the outputs.
It generally is called "effective altruism", eg, techno jesus will solve whatever problems creating techno jesus creates.
OK well now you have to look at changing the economy-wide energy mix or embracing de-growth. Switching data centers to 100% solar or nuclear or … solves Wired’s complaint but not this one.
> If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate
I can promise you it won't happen in a million years. More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work.. Or at least we have decades of data proving that is what realistically happen.
So the only way to reduce emissions is either using carbon neutral sources (gas is... not?) or forbidding people from using energy in the first place (and let's be honest, that will not happen.)
>More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work..
But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.
> But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world?
Only by the deceptive accounting trick of not including the emissions associated with overseas production of the goods consumed by the "developed world".
If you include all the emissions that prop up the highest per capita consumption patterns on the planet then you see the highest per capita emissions attached to the highest consumers.
>Only by the deceptive accounting trick of not including the emissions associated with overseas production of the goods consumed by the "developed world".
That does increase US's emissions, but not enough to change the conclusion:
Are you, like, just not very into reading things or remembering things or is it just one of those things where you're stuck in the 1980s and haven't updated your books since then.
That's not to mention talking people to suicide, which by the way is the far more likely way that it would kill your son or daughter, should you have or ever have one.
And for all that cost, are they bringing us real hope? The most ambitious people talking about this technology basically say that when it takes over all thought, there won't be much point in humans anymore.
We went from being evangelists of a message of hope to evangelists of a message of doom.
I'm not going to be one of those people. Fuck those people. I believe in the future. I will stand up and tell the next generation there is still hope, still compassion, still community and humanity and love out there. I fight for the users!!!
That has a body count. It's hard to know which people you're killing, but there's no doubt that at that point there's a number. Maybe... 10,000 or so? They'll die in heat waves and floods and tornadoes and food shortages in dry, hot, poor countries. Obviously 10k is a tiny fraction of the full list of climate fatalities.
Have you ever been in India while they have those incredibly hot heatwaves in the summer? That kills thousands of people every year. This will only get worse the more greenhouse gasses we emit so slop machines can generate funny videos of the pope breakdancing.
In history of the world there was almost never a reduction of greenhouse emissions. Only time that world did reduce greenhouse emissions was in times of economic crises and COVID-19.
Asia will do what US did in 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on July 15, 1979.
"Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun."
> New gas projects linked to just 11 data center campuses around the US have the potential to create more greenhouse gases than the country of Morocco emitted in 2024
"Have the potential to", "Morocco". Presumably doesn't count the greenhouse gases emitted by Moroccans using overseas cloud services and AI.
First most of the data center build out is happening in areas that have had little other opportunity so local resistance is muted. Abilene, Texas is referenced and is the kind of place my grandfather would lovingly say is where you go to learn to be a “dirt farmer”
Second, every environmentalist in the US is fighting 100 different battles with the most anti-regulation, pro-energy administration in decades (ever?) and has limited bandwidth.
And third, the AI narrative around national security, longevity, and super-intelligence-enabled abundance provides massive national coverage - the implications being that AI will solve any environmental and or human economic disasters that they enable.
Some batteries in this case is a bit like saying some water about the Pacific ocean.
There isn't a single battery this big today, but if batteries continue following the exponential growth curve they've been on then there probably will be in the next decade or so (if not sooner).
A large battery storage site is about 500MWh.
So this is totally doable and it’s also going to be economical as soon as the US has built enough LNG export capacity.
Very far from pro-energy when you give companies money to cancel energy projects that are not burning green house gases.
Speculation presented as fact...
Many environmentalists are pro-nuclear, and viewed exclusively through an environmental lens, nuclear is likely the best energy source.
Other people share the "environmentalist" label because they care about clean air, unpolluted rivers, biodiversity, climate change, etc but they oppose nuclear on unrelated grounds (eg, as part of an anti nuclear weapon proliferation agenda) or out of fear of adverse events from damage to an energy facility.
The "pro-environment but anti-nuclear" subgroup held power within the Democrat party in the US through most of the cold war era. The "pro-environment, pro-nuclear" subgroup is now the largest group within the Democrat voting base, but some of the people and all of the regulations from the 1960s-1990s are still in power.
This same pattern is occurring everywhere, regardless of local politics or local economic system. See Texas as another example.
It's because new renewables is superior at contemporary market prices. Markets have decided. Governments have decided. Everyone has decided.
Cancelling wind power contracts etc was a huge mistake.
Has everyone forgotten that the current crisis kicked off over the question of exactly how much uranium of what purity Iran is allowed to have? Do people really think that every country in the world should have multiple nuclear reactors?
Seriously. Don't even try to insert nuclear power into the debate before you show it can be competently built, never mind safely run and waste safely disposed. But what about the French you say! The French are discovering they forgot to set aside money for decommissioning.
Radiant with their modular reactors seems to be doing quite well.
Also, it was a very high priority for France - keep in mind Napoleon's quote about the relative importance of moral and material.
More critically: The logic of "The French did {extremely complex thing} fairly well in the late 1900's, therefore we can also" is very similar to the logic of "SpaceX designs and operates reusable rockets with hundreds of launches per year and no failures, therefore we can also". NO, sorry, you are just fantasizing about rocket science somehow being easy for you. SpaceX has lots of highly motivated would-be competitors - many of them far better financed than SpaceX was - but the hard fact is that zero of those can actually do what SpaceX is doing.
Right wing idiots are against solar and wind. Left wing idiots are against nuclear… leaving us with no alternative other than gas and oil!
The common denominators are “idiots” and oil.
Not to mention the new risks now that drone wars are a thing. All those Chemical plants are already valuable target, no need to additional nuclear ones.
Yeah it's far better to have power plants kill a steady stream of people, but in a banal way that's hard to attribute, like coal power plants causing lung cancer.
So build your data centers there. No reason to choose the least evil.
We had better options back then, and we chose not to implement them while slowing down efforts to improve them: nuclear reactor designs could have been standardized to lower cost, even safer and more effective reactor designs could have been pursued years earlier, etc.
The costs--and opportunity costs--of inaction during that time were massive, and we're going to be paying them for generations. Renewables have a heavier lift ahead of them as a result, with less time to build out and upgrade the grid, transition to EVs, etc. The very least we can do is acknowledge the consequences.
There is a lot of renewable energy in the US, and more is built all the time.
Sure, it would be nice to be able to build more transmission lines and power stations wherever it makes sense for engineering to build them in order to build a strong grid. But that's hard to do with strong private land ownership and required environmental impact reporting.
Something something texas avoiding federal electric regulation.
I found that a 100 MW datacenter can cost roughly $3.35 billion, with a significant portion going to high-end GPUs like the B100 or H100. For electricity, 100 MW data center can incur annual power costs ranging from $41 million to over $131 million, depending on regional energy prices.
AI data center investment is, at core, a bet on increasing the productivity of labor. That’s what businesses will pay for, and what will earn the big money.
If US labor productivity rises by more than 2%—and implicit in the size of this bet is a guess much higher—US carbon intensity goes down correspondingly, and these data centers end up as a win for the climate.
It generally is called "effective altruism", eg, techno jesus will solve whatever problems creating techno jesus creates.
More productivity means the employers just demand more from the workers
No, you'll work 40 hours and just do 10 times more in that time. Same thing.
I can promise you it won't happen in a million years. More productivity lends to more exploitation, because you can do more with the same unit of work, instead of getting the same result with less work.. Or at least we have decades of data proving that is what realistically happen. So the only way to reduce emissions is either using carbon neutral sources (gas is... not?) or forbidding people from using energy in the first place (and let's be honest, that will not happen.)
But per-capita greenhouse emissions have been falling in much of the developed world? And you can't really claim with a straight face that productivity has been dropping from 2000 to today.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...
Only by the deceptive accounting trick of not including the emissions associated with overseas production of the goods consumed by the "developed world".
If you include all the emissions that prop up the highest per capita consumption patterns on the planet then you see the highest per capita emissions attached to the highest consumers.
That does increase US's emissions, but not enough to change the conclusion:
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
Carbon intensity is not the relevant metric.
And there's no evidence or historic precedent backing your idea that it would go down anyway.
Does that comparison mean anything to anybody?
So is that a fair comparison?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Morocco
"New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses"
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-...
I wouldn't be surprised if they use this as an excuse to open up public lands for extraction.
We're now taking about how many people should die for this
And for all that cost, are they bringing us real hope? The most ambitious people talking about this technology basically say that when it takes over all thought, there won't be much point in humans anymore.
We went from being evangelists of a message of hope to evangelists of a message of doom.
I'm not going to be one of those people. Fuck those people. I believe in the future. I will stand up and tell the next generation there is still hope, still compassion, still community and humanity and love out there. I fight for the users!!!
That has a body count. It's hard to know which people you're killing, but there's no doubt that at that point there's a number. Maybe... 10,000 or so? They'll die in heat waves and floods and tornadoes and food shortages in dry, hot, poor countries. Obviously 10k is a tiny fraction of the full list of climate fatalities.
Tech used to offer society a vision for the future.
Guessing that is what GP means by body count
It’s quite impressive how the world is unable to reduce greenhouse emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
Asia will do what US did in 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered this televised speech on July 15, 1979.
"Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-...
All while increasing natural gas prices through blockades and threats of secondary sanctions.
It will make oil billionaires (e.g., like the ones who founded the Daily Wire) very happy.
"Have the potential to", "Morocco". Presumably doesn't count the greenhouse gases emitted by Moroccans using overseas cloud services and AI.
At least the example wasn't Vatican City.