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Comment by fullofideas | Hacker News Reader

>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.

I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans

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I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads

We should ask ourselves: is it worth ruining local communities in order to beat China in the global sphere?

That question was asked and answered years ago and the answer is YES (not me personally, but the people in charge)

There are things about China not to be celebrated but one cannot help but admire the way that they invest in their country as a whole. The US is all about "what's in it for me".

Fortunately, we have environmentalists who can protect us from a future of towering nuclear plants and wind turbines with hills covered in solar panels.

Is all that construction really worth it when we could be protecting neighborhoods and historic views?

That's absolutely a fair dig but it's far more complex than that. Our whole manufacturing base being outsourced is on the corporations who chose that "cost-cutting" path.

And it's not an entirely binary choice on protecting neighborhoods and views; for example what's happening in south Memphis with the power plant that's powering the Grok center there is a classic case of environmental racism -- they are cutting costs on pollution regulation because they have a community that they can dump the externalized costs on via their emissions.

Nobody's saying Grok shouldn't have the power, it's just a small detail on how that impact is managed.

I don’t think anyone is convinced that if the small detail were managed that there wouldn’t be another God of the Gaps small detail.

The frenetic pace of data center construction in the US means that nuclear is not a short-term option. No way are they going to wait a decade or more for generation to come on line. It’s going to be solar, batteries, and gas (turbines, and possibly fuel cells).

The current narrative is that we are out of power so we must shut down power projects that are not politically prioritized, and build nuclear and coal capacity, which is.

Nuclear power is what they are talking about, not weapons.

I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA.

About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.

Thankfully LLMs are a dead end, so nobody will make it to AGI by just throwing more electricity at the problem. Now if we could only have a new AI winter we could postpone the end of mankind as the dominant species on earth by another couple of decades.

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