alt Hacker NewsParts of it (e.g. water consumption per query) are overblown.
But the degree of data center buildout and resource use, if exponential growth just continues a little longer, is going to end up being a big number. AI datacenters are already stretching electrical power grids and increasing peaker power plant use.
Data centers right now are about 5% of electricity use in the US. AI could easily double that share.
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I was thinking about this the other day. Surely, a datacenter, even one optimized for machine learning workloads could switch gears and do other kinds of computations.
Even if the bubble were to pop, i feel like the worst that could happen is that we would have a bunch of inactive datacenters that could be switched on to meet demands of the growing internet. Kind of like how nuclear plants operate.
cmiiw to think along these lines though.
Yes, any major manufacturing ends up as a big number. It is still usually worth doing!