Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.
I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.
As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.
i would expect close to no 100LL burning planes use MEM.
Airplanes by virtue of their mode of operation stay out of the unhappy regime most of the time. Also, engines at/near idle produde orders of magnitude less emissions. Those aeroderivative generators are running at full capacity 24/7.
Dumping exhaust at ground level continuously is probably much worse than the airport. Even if it's a FedEx world hub.
It's the same datacenter? Ran by the same people?
That's the exact reason we will never go fully solar (or wind) unless an insanely impressive battery breakthrough makes storage effectively free while using only common, renewable components rather than rare earths.
Solar, wind, etc are excellent parts of an energy system, but its nearly impossible to cover base load at scale with generation that may only run for 0-5 hours a day.
edit: typo
1. https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-solar-panels-and-...
2. https://www.fastcompany.com/91500104/google-minnesota-data-c...
That still doesn't avoid the more fundamental math of having to store such massive amounts of energy though, even if you skip batteries and pump water to retention ponds uphill.
Even for small scale residential, the recommendation is to store 3 days worth of average usage to handle stretches of cloudy days and to have a generator for the times when that still doesn't cut it. You also need enough solar that 4-6 hours of generation can fill those batteries back up after a stretch of cloudy days.
You also have to contend with frequency issues. This is what took down Spain's grid, they had turned on a ton of solar at the time - with many gas plants offline a seemingly small dip below 60Hz really wrecks much of the system when it wasn't designed to handle those swings and triggers multiple safety mechanisms.
The "inertia" issues already have solutions being used in production (in Australia, for example).
The inertia problem you mention wasn't solved in Spain though, and whether it can be solved or already is elsewhere is irrelevant here.
> The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.
If I'm doing the math right, Minnesota used 65.7 TWh of power last year so to store 3 days worth of power just for that one city we would need a battery 18x larger than the one mentioned here.
I can't imagine we could ever scale such storage capacity for all energy use, let alone all the wind and solar required to fill it.
“Sorry, we have to shut down your database because it’s been overcast for the last two days”
Now, they could have a mix, of course, but just running on solar and batteries at that power is not realistic.
Some wild things happening with those, and infrasound. Colossus is shown 4 mins in
https://www.bearlythinking.com/p/andy-masley-doesnt-understa...
He has a full post response here: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/to-be-clear-i-do-understand-ho...
> Jordan is suspiciously lurching to the extremely high energy end of the light spectrum when we know that the low energy end (comparable to infrasound) doesn’t have negative impacts on us if we can’t detect its presence.
Masley spouts the falsifiable propaganda that any photon (light/emf) below ionizing radiation energy can only cause “heat” and can have no other possible harm effects.
Many science-minded people (though more accurately in this case, billiard-world materialists) have become quite militant defenders of this idea (ostensibly fighting off the hoardes of tinfoil hatters and quantum aquarians sensitive to 5g).
This point is very plausible military industrial propaganda. There were numerous studies with evidence (starting from the 60s) such as - non ionizing radiation (eg hv powerlines) might cause lots of cancer, and it’s weaponized (sub-thermal) usage can microwave the brains of enemy spies. THOSE studies have come out in declassified and leaked docs.
Now we have several plausible and serious theories of mechanism for low-f light disrupting biology that lean into quantum biology. While the iceberg of quantum biology understanding is still in its early decades, the mounting downstream evidence of health and medical issues are established public knowledge.
When you take a measurement of a sound, you are measuring both its pressure and its intensity, that is what is implied by a measurement in decibels. The measurement is taken from the point of the measurement device/listener in relation to the source/generator. If the measured value is potentially harmful, there is no such implication about needing to redirect additional energy to make it harmful, it's already been measured as potentially harmful at the point of measurement.
It's basically nonsense. My most charitable interpretation of his very first responsive argument is he's saying that a datacenter would need to intentionally direct energy towards increasing the intensity of its sound output to make Jordan's original measurements meaningful. That's neither how measurement works, nor how sound works, nor even how datacenters work. Things like sound and heat are BYPRODUCTS and not the point of the datacenter, both have an intensity, and that intensity is measurable, and any energy which is expended towards that intensity is energy that was wasted away from doing computations.
I stopped reading after this. I don't know if Masley is out of his element or just practicing motivated reasoning and thinks his readers are stupid. Either way, his rebuttal already failed on the first point.
So let's say you're a homebuilder, if I tell you I want a new home and I want to live there tomorrow, you can all of a sudden build it in a day, right?
Electricity use is skyrocketing for various reasons, these datacenters being one of them. There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence? No, probably more like supply lagging demand.
Or ASML and Nvidia and all also are incompetent, because they didn't see demand coming....
They're basically attempting to game the system, politically and economically, to put as much of the cost on taxpayers and ratepayers as they can. This naturally slows things down.
> There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence?
Mostly, yea. If the government gets out of the way there are plenty of people who would be happy to supply power in exchange for money. The homebuilding analogy is good because homebuilding in the US often has the same issues that plague the electricity market. There's no reason it should take years to build homes in many parts of this country, but it does.
We don't need the government to fix it by expanding power grids from the top down, we need free markets allowing competition.
But hey, number must go up, right?
This is a joke. Read it in a mocking tone.
Even if treating people as batteries doesn't make much sense as we are pretty terrible power plants, the message is clear and impactful. It is common for movies to oversimplify things, because they want to avoid having the viewer from being distracted from the main plot. It is tricky, as being too obviously wrong can breaks the immersion. I think the people = batteries analogy is a good compromise. Brains = computers, while technically more plausible would add a layer of complexity that could be a bit too much for a 2h action movie.
Undoubtedly, it will find cures to all cancers… The ARR and stock appreciation will be amazing. Except the cures will be found long after it has wiped out all humans.
Of course top of all that, even if human morals were perfect, it's still a dubious claim.
Greed is a societal illness.
Dario has been glorified unnecessarily. He's just like all the other people in the space: not good, not bad.
And keep in mind that when Dario was opposing AI usage by the US State he wasn't really opposing, he was just saying "not yet".
I fully expect "space AI" to be about as realistic as the flying cars and hover boards we've been promised since televisions were black and white.
I'm not sold that a data center in space is even possible unless and until we develop a drastically different solution for heat management.
If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
Come on, stop with the desperate false equivalencies.
A tremendous externality was leaded gas that was everywhere.