Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that’s natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There’s no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.

  • @breadsmasherEnglish
    108•2 months ago

    NVidia designing, building and selling these sorts of cards with astronomical power usage? I get it. They want to stay at the top.

    But those buying these cards at least need to be taxed, charged, regulated, whatever to make sure the huge additional power they require is funded by said company, and should only be green/renewable energy sources. And not using clean drinking water communities need for cooling.

    If companies want to run massive amounts of hardware like this, it should be prohibitively expensive unless they build their own GREEN power stations, and find ways to cool without using drinking water from any community.

    At the moment, taxes and government money goes into power stations which these DCs then use. All the cost is pushed right down onto the every day tax payer and consumer. But all the profit is flowing upwards.

    Make them pay for what they use. Make them pay to make these cards efficient, clean, and safe for our environment. Its not like these trillion dollar companies couldn’t pay for it all and make the world a better place.

    • PennomiEnglish
      31•2 months ago

      Using tons of energy isn’t a problem, as long as it’s carbon neutral (or negative). The problem is that we are simply not there yet. Taxing carbon is a great solution and would nearly immediately fix the problem (on the scale of years, not decades).

      • Admiral PatrickEnglish
        39•2 months ago

        Using tons of energy isn’t a problem, as long as it’s carbon neutral (or negative).

        That energy should go to more useful-to-society purposes, first. If all the “AI” datacenters are running on green power and the rest of us are still burning coal, then that’s green power that’s still wasted. It’s even more of a slap in the face if taxpayer funds go toward the costs of building any of those single-purpose green energy projects.

        • @[email protected]
          18•2 months ago

          Bingo, same argument I’ve had to bring up with crypto bros, if it’s using green energy that could be used to power essential things that are powered by fossil fuel then it’s green energy that we’re wasting. All these projects should be put on hold until we’re running on 100% green energy and we produce enough surplus that we can afford to use it for non essentials.

          • bizarroland
            2•2 months ago

            Seems like the smart move would make a mandate that any AI data center that wants to activate needs to provide its own power from wind and solar, or at least build or contribute to an existing wind and solar plant on the same grid to offset their estimated power consumption watt for watt.

            • @[email protected]
              5•2 months ago

              Same issue, why shouldn’t we use that to replace fossil fuel elsewhere instead? The land they’re using to produce green energy could be used to do the same but for essential needs instead.