[newtonsmethod]

The energy use by AI probably is just as, if not more, carbon intensive, but the article never says that. It talks about the energy use of the general data center.

> The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average.

[AnthonyMouse]

In case anyone is wondering why that is, it's because they put data centers in the places with the cheapest electricity. Which, in the US, is in places like Virginia and Ohio, where they burn fossil fuels.

If the people always talking about how cheap solar is want to fix this, find a way to make that cheapness actually make it into the customer's electric bill.

[ipdashc]

I've always wondered why data centers aren't taking off more in places like Iceland (cheap geothermal) or Quebec (cheap hydro). Both of these places are also pretty cold and one would think this benefits cooling.

There are periodically news articles and such about data centers in Iceland, of course, but I get the impression it's mostly a fad, and the real build-outs are still in Northern Virginia as they've always been.

The typical answer I've seen is that Internet access and low latency matter more than cooling and power, but LLMs seem like they wouldn't care about that. I mean, you're literally interacting with them over text, and there's already plenty of latency - a few extra ms shouldn't matter?

I'd assume construction costs and costs of shipping in equipment also play a role, but Iceland and Canada aren't that far away.

[fallingknife]

How much bandwidth is there in Iceland? I suspect not much because the population is only 400K. You will need to lay new undersea fiber. And how are you going to build them? The construction alone would take a massive amount of resources and manpower not feasibly available there. And what about the power supply? In data center heavy areas like Virginia, data center power consumption is already 25% of the entire state power consumption, and VA has 22x more people than Iceland. So if you build even 1/5th the number of data centers in just Virginia, that will consume the entire power grid of Iceland. Therefore, in addition to the data centers themselves, you are also going to have to build an entirely new grid and distribution system.

[ipdashc]

I did already mention both of those: re. bandwidth, I can't imagine LLMs use that much of it? It's just text - absolutely peanuts compared to something like Netflix. That said, of course, there are multimodal models. Construction difficulty is a factor, but at the same time, it's not like Iceland or Quebec/Canada are backwater regions, they're developed countries. Building a warehouse with some wires in it isn't the most complicated thing ever.

As for power, that's what I was referring to with geothermal and hydro - Iceland and Quebec both have famously cheap electricity. The former would need a large increase in capacity, for sure, but Quebec already pumps out a lot of power (and regularly sells it to the Northeastern US).

Not saying it wouldn't be difficult, by any means, but it does seem like all the right incentives are there.