[ch4s3]

> AI are much more energy-hungry than car manufacturing

This is not even remotely true[1]. Large auto plants use on the order of 200–250 megawatts of power, which is either on par with a data center or slightly more than a data center depending on the size and how cooling is handled.

[1] https://www.energystar.gov/sites/default/files/tools/Industr...

[tadfisher]

New AI data center builds are being specified in gigawatts, my friend.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yup. Here's slides from last year's HotChips on where AI racks are going: https://hc2025.hotchips.org/assets/program/tutorials/HC2025....

The racks rolling out now are in the 100s of KW each, targeting 1 MW per rack as the rough limit for using 400v DC.

The next iteration is go up to 800v DC, riding the coattails of power management components from the EV industry.

[jmyeet]

I suspect uou've misread that document. It is a good document though. It's saying a large parts plant uses ~188,000 MWh, I think per year.

A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity. Those two things aren't the same. 20MW of continuous electricity use (which AI data centers do) translates to 175,000 MWh of electricity per year. That's about the same as a minimum and might be 5+ times more.

This document is only about energy usage so we have to guess what "large" means in terms of employment but 3000 to 7000 seems to the range. Compared to 20-30.

But AI data centers are worse because they actually produce what I call negative jobs. Their currently only value proposition is in laying off people and otherwise suppressing labor costs. All while the residents all pay more for their electricity with the money no longer have because they got laid off.

[fc417fc802]

> A modern AI data center uses 20-100MW+ of electricity.

I understand the high end builds to have exceeded 100 kW per rack at this point, with the largest sites exceeding 1 GW (ie 10x your upper bound). So the smallest datacenters use as much as the largest auto plants, and the largest datacenters use 100x that.

[bnewbold]

Where are you getting the 200 megawatt number from?

The document you linked says that a large auto assembly plant consumes around 188,000 MWh annually (with regional variation). By my quick math that is less than 22 megawatts baseline load (24/7/365).

There is a mention that natural gas and other fuels being used on-site, are you converting those to MWh equivalent? I'm not as familiar with that conversion, but from a quick online calculator I found it would still be under 75 megawatt for electrical and fuel-equivalent combined.