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Comment by TheRealGL | Hacker News Reader

Did I miss the part where they mention the 10 large nuclear plants needed to power this new operation? Where's all the power coming from for this?

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Also, the fact they they announce not how much computing power they are going to deploy but rather how much electricity it's going to use (as if power usage is a useful measurement of processing power) is kind of gross.

"Good news everybody, your power bills are going up and your creaking, chronically underfunded infrastructure is even closer to collapse!"

Build this thing in the middle of the desert and you would need around 100 sq mile of solar panels + a fuck load of batteries for it to be energy independent. The solar farm would be around $10 billion which is probably far less than the gpus cost

Won't get you the necessary 4 9's uptime and energy sadly. Im still 100% for this -- but need another model for energy delivery.

Dissipating 10GW of heat is also a challenge in a sunny, hot, dry environment.

100 sq km should suffice

$10 billion is small change compare to the estimated all-inclusive cost of $10 billion for EACH 500MW data center ... $200 billion for 10GW.

Also water. You will be rationed, OpenAI will not.

https://www.newstarget.com/2025-08-02-texas-ai-data-centers-...

I assumed this headline was not aimed at the public, but at some utility they want to convince to expand capacity. Otherwise, bragging about future power consumption seems a bit perplexing.

Or to assuage investors participating in the OpenAI secondary on the issue of cash burn.

Consumer electric grids.

Yep. Consumers are screwed and $500/month electric bills are coming for the average consumer within a year or two. We do not have the electricity available for this.

I'm pretty average, living in a small home, and my electric bill is already >$500/mo in the summer, and that's with the A/C set at 76F during the day.

Where do you live? How old is your house?

500 is insane.

I don't expect him to tell you where he lives but my bill EXPLODED recently due to what I now know is data center demand.

How many kWh is that? At those amounts solar panels seem like a no-brainer business case?

Exactly this. This is essentially a new consumer tax in your electrical bill. The buildout of the electrical grid is being put on consumers essentially as a monthly tax with the increase in electrical costs. Everyone in the country is paying for the grid infrastructure to power these data centers owned by trillion dollar companies who aren't paying for their needs.

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