xAI installs eight converted jet engines to power Mississippi data center(www.tomshardware.com)
12 pointsby rbanffyan hour ago3 comments
  • tencentshillan hour ago
    Makes it pretty clear generation capacity was never a real argument against EV adoption. We'll recycle rusty jet engines to get it done when there's real money on the line.
  • joshstrange30 minutes ago
    This is off-topic and I'm no fan of xAI or any company circumventing rules to allow them to use dirty energy sources.

    That said.

    > Normally, that would be enough to keep around 15,000 homes up and running.

    Am I the only one who finds this kind of comparison meaningless? Like it's supposed invoke a feeling of "15K homes worth of power! How absurd that a data center use that much!" but that kind of how all centralized things work. That datacenter does work for, one would assume, way more than just 15K homes and if those homes wanted the same "work" output they'd use the same, or most likely, more energy to accomplish the same thing.

    In many/most cases they aren't using electricity just to use it, they are using it because people are paying them for the output. With economies of scale I would guess a datacenter is many times more efficient than if we were all running local models at home.

    Again, not an argument for data centers as much as I find this comparison always pointless.

    • kristjansson18 minutes ago
      It's like using bathtubs as a unit of measure for large volumes of water. Yes it communicates the scale, but abjectly fails to communicate the relative in-cohort comparison i.e. is this a lot of power for an industrial user? Is it wasting power /generating more emissions relative to other similar applications or not?
      • triceratops3 minutes ago
        Agree. Comparing it to other industrial users (X car factories) might be more useful.
    • zekrioca15 minutes ago
      I mean, they need to give an intuition of the magnitude. Tell me, what do you think when I say “a GPU consumes 1 kW of power”? What does that even mean to the regular Joe?

      It is pretty easy to compare against homes because they consume on average 1 kWh of electricity (in the U.S.). It could be something else, but 99% of people have homes they live in, so this is something directly linked to their experiences. So it is not meaningless at all.

    • FLeXMurphy25 minutes ago
      As always, remind yourself: "the outrage is the product". The entire point of slotting something like that in is to get eyeballs and produce outrage on tap. It's the new dopamine. Justified or not is irrelevant, what matters is to have a talking about you can use to rile things up, no matter how pointless it is.
  • ChrisArchitectan hour ago
    [dead]