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Comment by asciimike | Hacker News Reader

Lots of good options for cheap GPU clouds, including Paperspace (mentioned above), Coreweave, and Crusoe Cloud (crusoecloud.com). Crusoe Cloud's angle is that our GPUs are powered off otherwise wasted energy and are carbon-reducing; running one for a year provides an emissions reduction equivalent to taking one car off the road.

Disclosure, I'm head of product @ Crusoe Cloud. Feel free to ping me at mike at crusoecloud dot com if you've got questions or feedback.

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How can this be carbon-reducing? That sounds like a dubious marketing claim.

TL;DR: we run data centers on-site at oil wells and take natural gas that would otherwise be flared (it can't be economically transported as natural gas in a pipeline or turned into electricity and transported) and combust it completely. Methane is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, so it ends up being a net reduction in emissions vs what's currently happening.

https://www.crusoeenergy.com/digital-flare-mitigation has some more information.

Is flare combustion more incomplete than your generation?

on the other hand, does that mean you're obligated to be in oil producing countries? how does the geopolitics of that work?

Cool idea. Tried to join your waitlist but the form throws errors. Could be my security measures, but I’m on mobile safari, toggled off all content blockers and still had an error.

Odd, I just tested on Safari mobile and it went through without issues. Mind sending me an email at mike at crusoecloud dot com and we can get you set up?

How do you carbon offset?

We have a bunch of diseased pine trees. Assuming we don't have enough time to cut them down and burn them in the next 12 months, and that I am unscrupulous, I could sell you carbon credits through one of the bigger exchanges. You would never know, and it would be completely above board.

John Oliver had a particularly depressing segment on this recently.

(Totally off topic, but I'd love to biochar them instead. Using them for lumber and shipping them offsite are non-starters. Any ideas, anyone?)

See above post, but the TL;DR: is "we capture methane that would otherwise be flared."

Agreed that a lot of carbon offsets look like, "we were going to cut this section of the rainforest down, but if you pay us, we won't do that for X period of time." This is _actually_ reducing existing emissions.

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