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by nradov 290 days ago
That's why wealthy investors connected to the AI industry are also throwing a lot of money into power generation startups, particularly fusion power. I doubt that any of them will actually deliver commercially viable fusion reactors but hope springs eternal.
2 comments

Imagine solving energy as a side effect of this compute race. There's finally a reason for big money to be invested into energy infrastructure and innovation to solve a problem that can't be solved with traditional approaches.
I would trade the destruction of trustworthy information and images on the internet for clean fusion power. It's a steep cost but I think it's worth it.
Continuing to carve out economies of scale in battery + photovoltaic for another ten doublings has plenty of positive externalities.

The problem is that in the meantime, they're going to nuke our existing powergrid, created in the 1920's to 1950's to serve our population as it was in the 1970's, and for the most part not expanded since. All of the delta is in price-mediated "demand reduction" of existing users.

A lot of the biggest data centers being built are also building behind the meter generation dedicated to them.
Which is mostly natural gas sadly.
Yep they are tapping directly into main pipelines.