Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
3,600 of those industrial-scale generators to power Stratos
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It’s an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn’t surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.
At least in this case it gets across the truly stupid amount of energy being wasted. As a general rule I think that if you can boil one of the great lakes with your daily thermal output you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
Is that a realistic Approximation of energy usage? This seems a lot to me, even over the span of one day
Definitely off by a few orders of magnitude.
17gw is about the same size as the Hiroshima bomb - 63 terajoules is 17 GWh and the 9GW data centre produces at least 16GWs of heat. Pretty scary when looked at like that.
17gw of heat is both under and over estimate.
Caterpillar 2.5mw generators have maximum efficiency of 45%, and so 19gw is peak thermal power. that is roughly 26 hiroshimas per day.
It’s an over estimate because datacenter cpu/gpu capacity utilization is on average under 10%. It could still produce all that power for export to trap all that heat in a valley.
Not that it would matter for this conversation, but at hyperscalers levels, the energy required for mechanical loads is under 20% of the compute load. Wouldn’t surprise me if ~10% can be achieved at multi GW scale. Thus about 11GW total energy.
Does “9GW data center” not mean “a data center that consumes 9GW of power”?
Or is it “9GW of computers + 5GW of cooling + something”?
its 9gw of consumption. 19gw of total heat generation.
9GW should be the compute load goal, to which you need to add the mechanical and administrative loads. At higher scales they gain significant efficiencies which translates to market advantages.