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Comment by xynelius | Hacker News Reader

I was curious how much energy is actually needed to power these datacenters, so I did a little bit of math.

Looking at Nvidia revenues in the past few years, there's maybe $300 billion worth of GPUs currently deployed in the U.S. The B200 costs ~$40k, so we have 7.5 million B200-equivalents, which draw 1000W. Running these at full capacity requires 66 TWh a year, or ~1.5% of total current U.S. electricity consumption. Maybe a bit more to account for inefficiencies, cooling, and other components, but not more than ~2.5% total I would guess.

So it's not that much in reality, but will definitely grow fast.

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> Running these at full capacity requires 66 TWh a year,

I think your numbers are off.

For a start you are effectively calculating a GPU only number.

I think 100Twh would be the minimum level to think about "all-in". And even that is probably being generous.

Remember, afterall that Google have just bought half the capacity (4.1Twh) of a nuclear power plant in Finland, on top of 630 MW of wind and 94MW of battery.

This is to cater for three new sites at Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala and expansion at Hamina. So basically 3.5 datacentres.

But Finland is quite a small place. The US has more sites and bigger sites, so the numbers probably grow exponentially very quickly.

It's even less if adjusted for non 100% (more like 0.35% of total). Yet factual impact on the grid and other industries will not be as small as numbers appear. For example most probably there will appear transformer (electric) and witchgear deficites. And this is not the only supply chain bottleneck in this subject

For 1000w draw it also generates almost as much heat, is your math including all the cooling required?

Moving 1000W of heat generation takes way less than 1000W.

Hyperscaler PUE (which includes cooling, power conversion, etc) is typically 1.10-1.15, so multiply 1.5% by 1.1.

The person you replied to already mentioned cooling and multiplied by 1.67 to cover ancillary uses.

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