[HarHarVeryFunny]

Amazon already have a datacenter with an attached nuclear power plant, and Microsoft have contracted with Helion for future delivery of a fusion power plant (assuming it materializes).

https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow...

Zuckerberg says part of the problem is not just the amount of power needed for a SOTA AI-training datacenter (~1GW), but the fact that you need the power at that particular location which makes co-locating a power plant the best option. The biggest solar power plants in China put out over 2GW, but the biggest in the US is Solar Star in CA, wihch occupies 12 km^2 and only puts out 58MW.

[Syonyk]

Where are you getting your information?

There are many solar plants in US well in excess of 58MW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_Mountain_Solar_Facility is one, at 800MW.

It was at 58MW in 2010... which might confuse a LLM, though.

[IggleSniggle]

Thank god for comments like this. I find it truly disturbing how much people are treating LLMs like fact-machines. They are pattern matching machines that match using whatever information they have that matches best.

It's closer to improv jazz than to factual authority; still super wonderful, and worthwhile listening to, but not really for the purpose of learning how the original sounded when it was first recorded. Sure, you might get a sense of the original, but that's all it is: an impression. When you ask for facts, you get an impressionist render of facts, which sometimes, maybe even often times, accurately depict the Truth. But sometimes they depict the Truth the way an artist depicts the truth: if it feels right, it's right.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Actually I got it from Google search, so you might have done a little fact checking yourself, before launching into your LLM speech.

This is the top Google search result for "largest solar farm".

"The 15 largest solar farms in the world 2024"

https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/biggest-solar-f...

Another top result for Solar Star is this:

https://8billiontrees.com/solar-panels/largest-solar-farm/

Which indicates (correctly or not) a current capacity of 314MW for Solar Star 1 (still less than the 1GW needed for Zuckerberg's projected SOTA data center).

[kolinko]

I think the 58MW claim is so blatantly wrong that it’s not LLM that produced that „fact”.

I discussed various climate related things with chatgpt and it doesn’t make such crazy mistakes.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Correct - it's from the "Top 5 Largest Solar Power Plants in the World (2024)" web site, which is Google's #1 search result for "biggest solar farm".

https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/biggest-solar-f...

The WikiPedia page for Solar Star indicates a capacity of 579MW, which may have been mis-parsed by a human as 57.9MW?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Star

[card_zero]

Jazz facts

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Google search for "largest solar farms" or similar, but my bad - should have checked the date of the source.

The point I was trying to make, echoing Zuckerberg (who noted that power, not chips or data, is the constraining factor for further LLM scaling), is that power needs to be near to the data center, else the lead time and red tape will be even longer. If we're considering clean power then solar is an option, which limits datacenter location to where that is viable on this 1GW scale.

It's funny that you're the second person in this thread to assume that just because the data was wrong (out of date as it happens) it must have come from an LLM (which it didn't). I guess this is the world we are moving into, where all content is suspect of being AI generated and therefore suspect!

[tim333]

I was curious how Helion were coming along and found quite a good youtube "Will the Helion Fusion Reactor ACTUALLY work? - Nuclear Engineer Reacts to Real Engineering." The answer seems to be maybe eventually but not for quite a while. (vid https://youtu.be/lb7GXi0ZvYw)

I fear their breakeven in 2024 will go the same way as the one back in 2018. (HN on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37676263)

That said they are building away on their latest Polaris machine. It'll be interesting to see how it works.

>Helion sets an ambitious goal to begin producing electricity by mid-2024, utilizing its innovative Polaris reactor. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/helion-aims-fusion-energy-bre...

[anonylizard]

The huge solar power plants in China are in western China, aka deserts and frozen desert mountains, aka you can't build data centers there either. And shipping that power across thousands of KMs is as hard for China as it is for the US.

Hence China is still building coal plants, and won't really stop. Especially if it means the future of AI is being bottlenecked by it.

[maxglute]

PRC is attempting to optimize large compute clusters near renewables via "East Data West Computing" / "Eastern Data, Western Computing". Peak coal is expected in the next few years, new "cleaner" plants mainly replacing old plants. But there's is very much ongoing project to colocate computing/data closer to renewables. If choice is between coal + bottleneck AI, they'd chose coal. But with renewable projected to be 15-30% cheaper than coal in coming years, especially with PRC indigenous semi nodes behind (more power ineffecient per unit of compute), they'd go with renewables + shuttling data around.

[kolinko]

58MW would be ~0.5 km^2. One hectare is one MW (in Poland, in US it’s better because more sunlight, if I’m not mistaken)