||| FROM THE ATLANTIC |||
This is Colossus: a data center that Musk’s artificial-intelligence company, xAI, is using as a training ground for Grok, one of the world’s most advanced generative-AI models. Training these models takes a staggering amount of energy; if run at full strength for a year, Colossus would use as much electricity as 200,000 American homes. When fully operational, Musk has written on X, this facility and two other xAI data centers nearby will require nearly two gigawatts of power. Annually, those facilities could consume roughly twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle.
OpenAI has announced plans for facilities requiring more than 30 gigawatts of power in total—more than the largest recorded demand for all of New England.
To get Colossus up and running fast, xAI built its own power plant, setting up as many as 35 natural-gas turbines.
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For those without an Atlantic subscription, you can read the full article here:
https://archive.ph/VUCXT
It’s quite good, at least until the final paragraph, when the journalist, who’s just written an entire article about the material and energy demands of data centers, and AI data centers in particular, then dismisses these concerns by saying we’ll get to a “carbon free future”:
“AI may well overhaul how humans think and work, but it’s also pushing us toward another inflection point. We can unlock the promises of this technology by doubling down on the energy systems of the past, or we can seize the opportunity to push the grid into a carbon-free future. To get there, an industry that likes to move at warp speed will have to develop a quality it severely lacks: patience.”
As if solar panels can mine lithium, graphite, copper, and cobalt (they can’t), and the sulfuric acid made from sulfur made in oil refineries can just magically appear out of nowhere to refine the materials that make data centers and computers, and as if every step of the materials supply chain of these data centers and the computers and cooling systems and energy systems are not tied directly to oil and gas and always will be.
With this paragraph, the journalist also dismisses the many unsavory (to put it mildly) uses of AI, including Grok, which include a deluge of degrading pornography (like Grok’s “undress her” and “hit her” functions) and child sexual abuse material, as if these don’t matter as long as the energy to power them is “clean and green”.
What a way to end the article.