https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/building-the-800-vdc-ecosy...
More generally, a bunch of the electrical industry heavyweights are involved in a standard for DC microgrids called Current/OS: https://currentos.org/
There are certainly advantages to DC vs AC, but there's of course a huge amount of sunken cost in contemporary AC networks.
Having both forms of generation available at the same time is the best solution. Once you put a data center on the grid you can mix the fuel however you want upstream. This should be the ultimate goal and I believe it is for all current AI projects. I am not aware of any data center builds that intend to operate on parking lot generators indefinitely.
I think the dust is the worst part in terms of operational concerns.
I guess there was a bit of thought about transmission with the reference to high voltages. Another interesting thing: batteries allow you to reduce the needed capacity for transmission lines – if you have batteries near generation and then transmit power at a lower maximum, same average rate than if you only have batteries near use, you can more efficiently use the available transmission.
I guess the main reason for gas to be a problem is if you can’t get new generation (eg lack of turbines).
If you could make those panels and chips on the Moon, Deimos, Mars, high Jupiter, wherever, then space datacenters can totally work.
Edit: Added some primary sources [2][3][4], including an interactive website by Andrew McCalip which lets you play around with the unit economics of orbital 'datacenters' at various price points [4].
[1] https://youtu.be/DCto6UkBJoI
[2] https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/suncatcher_paper.p...
Should they be close to the solar arrays (that is, in the desert, with data networks connecting them to were the tokens are used)
Or close to their customers (which mean far from the solar arrays, with electricity networks)
He's talking a lot about removing movable parts, but aren't the wires going to be an limiting factor ?
I do not think I even understand your complaint. Different people can work on different problems. We do not have to pick only one.
> My improvement is more important than yours.
We can just do both.
All the other concerns require more subtle approaches because human requirements are much more messy.
these companies and the author of the article are trying to increase capacity for something that barely anyone wants in the software they use, which makes it all the more wasteful.
The scale of AI energy consumption is quite unique from what I heard, and there’s a lot of money flowing into that direction. So that seems to me a decent reason to think about that.
I haven’t heard yet that food production is constrained by these kind of things.
It appears to make that you’re just taking a cheap jab at AI.
1. The actual thing the authors spend a lot of time thinking about seems to be more generally how to make good use of solar power for things that people find valuable – synthetic fuels desalination, etc – and the implications of the sun only shining some of the time – maybe you don’t want to pay more for more efficient systems as then you want steady power which is more expensive.
2. I think the blog post is a bit of a response to lots of public discussion about AI data centres. IMO seems better to see what someone who thinks a lot about energy has to say than eg, a government suggestion that you delete old pictures to reduce water consumption.
You realize that even pre-AI, that this complaint would still hold for most of tech? Adtech, enterprise SaaS, and B2C apps are hardly "actual human material needs". Even excluding tech, the next lucrative sector would be banking, and same complaint would be applicable. In other words, this is a decades (centuries?) old complaint, repackaged for the current thing.
and what communications you find lacking?
Handling food waste is another issue.
Climate related shortage are coming soon for us (at the moment they only manifest as punctual price hikes - mustard a few years ago, coffee and chocolate more recently, etc...
https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/02/13/goodbye-gouda-and-...
https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/adverse-climatic-conditi...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/noelfletcher/2024/11/03/how-cli...
I don't know if the electricity going into compute centers could be put to better use, to help alleviate climate change impacts, or to create more resilient and distributed supply chains, etc...
But I would not say that this is "not a problem", or that it's completely obvious that allocating those resources instead to improving chatbots is smart.
I understand why we allocate resource to improving chatbots - first world consumers are using them, and the stock markets assume this usage is soon going to be monetized. So it's not that different from "using electricity to build radios / movie theater / TVs / 3D gaming cards, etc... instead of desalinating water / pulling CO2 out of the air / transporting beans, etc...
But at least Nvidia did not have the "toupet" to claim that using electricity to play Quake in higher res would solve world hunger, as some people claim:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/05/03/sam-altma...
I have been extremely skeptical and dismissive of LLMs for a long time, but after a certain level of improvement you have to realize that at least for programming the advantages are substantial.
That regulatory capture con strangled more emerging economies than most like to admit. =3
"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics" (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith)
The datacenters of Meta, Google, Amazon, etc. are primarily funded by the government?
