[motorpixel]

Someone please correct my math.

The article says 240 Gigawatts of capacity is allocated for AI datacenters.

New York City draws about 10 Gigawatts in the hottest months of the year due to extra load from AC use.

So am I understanding correctly that these people want to foist upon the power grid 24 NYCs?

[ua709]

It's probably more correct to say that there are some people who project that 240GW of additional power will be required by data centers in the near future.

Yes, that number is absurd, and data centers will certainly need to make do with less, regardless of actual requirements.

[cyberge99]

That also fails to take efficiency and cost optimization into account. Just parsing out salutations and please/thank you from AI requests reduces utilization and that’s not really even intense optimization.

[kerblang]

Earlier today on the radio I heard Houston TX was 20 GW at peak load.

Texas is [d]oing its best to build as many datacenters & power plants as possible. They were describing it as "Texas will have more datacenters than anyplace else in the world." This was public radio, but everybody's taking a hit on the ol' AI pipe nowadays.

[Ekaros]

Which running 24/365 would correspond to about half of total electricity consumption of USA...

At cost of 0.01 per kwh would be 21 billion... And electricity generally is not that cheap everything considered...

[mekael]

I’ve never thought of it in terms of “how many new metropoli(sp) are being added”, but it seems like a deceny unit of measure. If we use the average of 6gw, we’re adding essentially 40 nyc’s.