You’re talking about one of the most hated person on hearth with one of the worst reputation. The literal Nazi salute guy. I don’t think he cares much about positive PR like that
The problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well
Remember when they said they couldnzt electrify the grid for ev's so they opted to just not do anything with ev's. Now datacenters are getting rushed in so fast and breaking the grids so hard they can illegally running generators
They could (and should be required to) build out their own solar/wind/battery infra as part of standing up a new datacenter. So much money is being wasted on poisoning our air and further enriching the richest companies in the history of the world.
It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.
Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.
The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.
For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
cheap, dirty, loud "tbh. shouldn't exist" kind fo gas generators are far more available and what is widely used
but also huge part of the solar supply bottleneck is artificial due to import regulations from china and both the US and EU having failed to secure meaningful domestic solar supply chains.
»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.«
Are the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?
But that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability.
AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.
A rat taking out a DC resulting in a black start event isn't the same thing as being able to turn a DC on and off at will. The thousands of computers in an DC running various bits of software don't just power on like your Windows computer and result in a working data center after a couple of minutes automatically.
- Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it.
- Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc.
- Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production.
Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types.
They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.
> Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are.
these data centers dont care that much about network throughput - you can sneakernet the training set into place and inference on the text isnt that taxing on the network
there's a reason the ai datacenters are being built wherever the power is cheapest and theres the lowest regulations. there's no real physical location requirement, so you could actually put them close to the solar power generation
Solar works as well as it does only because we’ve spread it out and connected it to a grid. When it is overcast in one spot it is sunny elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” has to be far enough away to get different weather.
This means a grid capable of transferring 100% of the needed power.
So even if you plopped a new DC in the middle of a field of panels you’d still need a ~1 GA grid connection… or a battery array many times the size as you’d otherwise need just to cover night time usage.
All those companies are sitting on literally hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. If they need this so badly, let them build the connection and other infrastructure.
They want to build the data centres right now, but the power companies and other energy suppliers are booked solid for 5+ years out.
Money or not, you can't just click your fingers and instantly get regulatory approval, or spin up a facility to build parts that only a handful of places have ever figured out how to mass-manufacture.
Gas turbine blades are especially difficult, but batteries and panels are not far behind. There are a surprisingly small number of shops capable of making power switching gear and transformers too.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
Building gas power plants that run only a few weeks per year is very expensive. Just compare prices in Germany (gas) with China (coal) or Finland (nuclear).
A more economical way would be to build nuclear power plants that power electrolyzers most of the time and provide power to the grid when necessary.
In the US, gas power plants make more sense due to ridiculously cheap gas, but even then the capacity factor of those power plants is much higher than 10%.
Or we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
Comparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think?
Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind.
I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts?
In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc.
Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan.
You also don't have to build mountains to utilize hydro. There are areas that are utilizing pumped hydro to store the kinetic energy to smooth the baseline.
I've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.
Yep and China is leading the world in recent and active construction of traditional hydro (dams) and pumped hydro storage to reduce their reliance on coal for baseload. I'm done with your bad-faith arguments.
Their 30 year plan is to move to nuclear for base load, and they are on track to manage it. The only people who think China is moving to a pre 2020 like western grid are people who don't know the first thing about China.
Idk. about any specific data center but many of this data centers aren't for AI training / making advancements on the AI race. They have sufficient resources for that already AFIK.
They are to run AI, so that the 100th app can force an AI agent down your throat weather your want or not /s. (Or in more optimistic words, so that the AI adoption can spread as fast as their is demand.)
Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027...
That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones)
A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far)
Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a data center of a super computer in the mittle of a city and there where no sound issues at all (through yes it was a special case in many ways).
I mean yes, it costs more and many well established companies for high quality gas turbines are booked out.
Still using the kind of gas turbines which can bring back literal acid rain shouldn't be an option at all.
Lets also not speak about the environmental/health damage the production of the natural gas through fracking does.
Which bring us to a common nonsense argument, people going on and on about hoe economically expensive/harmful climate protection is, but totally missing that many oft he circumvented laws are not for climate protection but are for environmental protection for the sake of humans health.
To make thinks worse most of this data centers seems to be more about making money, then being in any way relevant for winning any AI race...
Problem is all the (relatively) efficient and (relatively) quiet turbines have long since been snapped up, so the AI sloppers have to go with inefficient, noisy ones for the foreseeable future. And given that no-one knows when the AI bubble will finally burst, no manufacturer wants to sink hundreds of millions into new plant to produce turbines in a year or two when the sloppers may be barely alive on taxpayer cash injections.
No, there are extreme consequences only when toes are stepped on. For example SBF... If it was run by Musk or Trump you can be sure there would be no sentence. I'm not arguing what SBF did isn't a crime. I'm saying if that deserves 20 years, then everything else should also be equally punished.
* you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).
* running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).
* the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.
* The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.
* in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.
Gas is ridiculously cheap in the US while it's often the most expensive source of electricity in the rest of the world.
We're currently seeing a bifurcation where Asia bets on anything but oil and gas while the US goes in the opposite direction. Note that anything but oil and gas includes coal, so this isn't about the environment.
At least these sites (its more than Amazon) are being built near the energy source they will consume. Straight out of the ground into a turbine and then into the electron spinners.
Also there's not a lot of anything where these sites are located (Near El Paso). The 4-5 Road Runners who live around there will probably appreciate the change.
No one cares about West Texas, it's about the 33 million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and warming the world.
Reminder that the USA are the country that historically burned the most fossil fuels, the world's largest extractor of oil, the only country trying to do a 180 on coal power.
Half of the world has experienced unprecedented heatwaves that will become the norm in 2050.
Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.
The quip doesn't say "dilution helps." It says "the solution to pollution is dilution." Dilution solves the problem. And not only that, but it's the solution, not merely a solution.
This is just not true, and you seem to agree with that.
Yes, CO2 is problematic because of the sheer volume. The sheer volume means that dilution does not solve the problem.
Leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. Which means that dilution does not solve the problem.
also, i don't necessarily mean to endorse this worldview in terms of its potential impact on policy, though there may be some truth to it, technically speaking.
A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?
Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.
A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.
I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.
I think in this thread it’s worth posting out that interest rates aren’t actually high historically. They’re pretty normal. They were just wildly low for around a decade or so.
If you look at a 30-year fixed mortgage chart, the <6% rate situation only existed between roughly 2008 and 2021. At no other time in the history of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was it ever that low. Ever.
I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.
A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-...
Solar dc data centers are marginally cheaper. However right now the incentives are on buliding data centers (including power sources) the fastest. Despite this i would bet that you could build solar and batteries as fast as (or even faster) as building gas power plants, but the current governmend really likes to see fossils and setting the planet on fire.
Permitted maximum of 10 grams(2 nickels) of CO2 per hour for every person in the US. 33 million tons * 2000 ton/pound * 454 g/pound / 365 days in a year / 24 hours in a day / 342.6M people in us = 9.984 grams
It's important to distinguish the toxic SOX/NOX emissions from CO2 which is not toxic but is a greenhouse gas. These two categories and materially different and conflating them is very risky. For example if this were to replace an equivalently sized coal plant it would be a net improvement
Carbon tax is the only way, you need to pay for picking up the garbage from the road or the air, the cost to clean op pollution and trash needs to be accounted for.
It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.
Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.
So they can have cancer and not work... I guess that's better then working and having cancer. Or the people just starve instead so we don't have to worry about the pollution.
Making this argument is a strong indicator that you are extremely under-educated on this subject or motivated to make dishonest arguments.
There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...
"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.
Yes, but those are a priority below massive solar and wind deployment because nuclear is another way to say emissions will rise for decades before the plants come online and start displacing fossil fuels. There are a few edge cases where nuclear might be necessary but there is an enormous amount of fossil fuel usage which could easily be replaced except for political capture by the oil and coal industries.
Nuclear is good for the last 10% (and very contextually - it maybe makes a lot of sense in Alaska but far less sense in Arizona, for example), but mostly we should be building more solar/wind/batteries, as they can be built both faster and increasingly cheaper over time (the cost of batteries has dropped ~97% in the last 20 years IIRC, solar and wind have similarly been dropping in price).
The main argument for nuclear besides "baseload" is that nuclear plants can potentially last for a century and will thus amortise its capex quite easily and afterwards become relatively cheap for most of its life. Except, given just how quickly solar is dropping right now, it's unreasonable to assume that 50+ years from now (so, in ~2076) already-built nuclear will be cheaper than contemporary solar tech (I.e. solar panels built in 2075). In fact, it's unreasonable to assume that nuclear plants will necessarily be longer-lasting than future solar panels, given current research into self-healing solar panels (which clearly isn't commercially ready, but very likely will be within 50 years). Even if they can only self-heal 3 times, that's 4x the lifetime for 120 years total, and much longer if the base lifetime of the panel is more than 30 years. And frankly nuclear will never beat solar panels on operational costs - nuclear has a 24/7 guard, a nuclear reactor and a turbine, whereas the closest thing PV has to moving parts is the de-dusting machines.
Similar logic for solar also applies to wind and batteries, of course - their price has been dropping like a rock for decades. And that compounds - if both solar and batteries get twice as cheap and their lifetime lasts twice as long, then the whole package becomes 4x cheaper. And the cheaper wind turbines get, the fewer batteries solar needs to plug the holes in intermittent generation.
A quick aside: a lot of focus on solar lifetimes assumes the minimum will be the average, but e.g. 1980s solar panels are still in operation with only 10-20% performance degradation IIRC so the popular assumption that solar panels last only 30 years seems a bit ridiculous.
China's nuclear stats should be kept in perspective by the way: IIRC ~90% of the generation they're building is non-nuclear renewables. They're also building more of basically everything than the rest of the world combined, so an absolute stat like "they're building 37 of X" isn't particularly useful except for conveying that China is building a lot of stuff.
To repeat, though: the US should still build nuclear plants (unless/until they get financially blitzed by renewables). My point here is to keep it in perspective.
And I don't mean to insinuate you said otherwise, I'm just kind of pre-emptively responding to a stereotype/common set of associated arguments, I guess.
Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.
What do you want? To keep chasing the perfect or to embrace digging ourselves out of this mess by whatever means? I think I know the answer and I'll bet we disagree.
But I too would prefer we pivoted to renewables and nuclear, increasingly renewables over nuclear with time, but I'd have to move to China for that (yet they ended up firing up the coal plants because of the Iran War). It's not happening here even when the free market indicates it's the best play because it undercuts oil and gas and they own the politicians as the masses mostly don't bother to vote. What is your plan that works in reality as opposed to the Aldous Huxley semi-dystopia the west has become? I know, I know, getting the job done by any means is wrong think, demanding perfection is right think.
I’m basing it on things like https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2026.121752 finding that it’s going to be hard both to scale up and get past 90% unless we have massive amounts of clean energy available. To me that means that we shouldn’t be approving any new fossil emissions and treating capture / sequestration as a nice bonus if we can make it work rather than something we can count on the make the numbers work.
The best thing I see is that economic pressure is mounting: even with Trump breaking so many laws on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, people want to deploy solar or wind power because that saves them money.
"The decarbonization of industrial hard-to-abate sectors through CCUS is critical, and that can be illustrated by looking at the target sources, such as the cement industry, accountable for 6–7% of global anthropogenic emissions [1]; or the steel manufacturing value chain, responsible for 7% of global energy-related emissions [2]. Given such dimensions, it can be concluded that carbon capture is critical to achieving CO2 restriction goals."
"In the cement industry it is worth highlighting that 60–70% of the total emissions of CO2 does not come from fuel combustion, but from the decomposition of the limestone into calcium oxide and CO2 "
So you can't get past 90% in the first place without carbon sequestration.
We have the same goal, but we see different paths to achieving it. I think if we do what it takes with carbon sequestration, the free market solves this for real as more and more profitable renewable power generation is stood up. But I do not believe that happens without the fossil fuel incumbents soft landing or finding bagholders to take the hit in the long run. And I won't count on Americans to demand better given all it took was the president to say he hates EVs and EV sales plummeted.
Personally, my house is more or less off the grid electrically already with a ton of solar panels and 75 kWH of battery backup. I voted with my wallet.
Currently the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the planet has failed to meet it's goals. Had it actually met the design goals it would be part of an LNG power source that manages to reclaim only 80% of the CO2 it releases.
That's not net zero, it falls short, and that's a good attempt but hardly viable.
The desired goal is to eliminate further emissions and also go further and claw back some of those gigatonnes of previously sequestered CO2 released by humans over the past century.
Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o(
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...
Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it.
Especially if he buys from his own company.
and would be cheaper in the long run? or maybe they could even do solar + storage.
i guess even at this stage “gas is easier” is still winning…
You’re talking about one of the most hated person on hearth with one of the worst reputation. The literal Nazi salute guy. I don’t think he cares much about positive PR like that
The problem is that the grid can’t get built out fast enough. You’ll probably see most AI data centers switch to grid power in the coming years using mostly wind and solar because it’s simply cheaper as well
Remember when they said they couldnzt electrify the grid for ev's so they opted to just not do anything with ev's. Now datacenters are getting rushed in so fast and breaking the grids so hard they can illegally running generators
EVs aren't popular in the US due to the Republicans being beholden to oil and gas interests and the Democrats to unions. The grid was just an excuse.
Both sides! We need to make up democrats against EV, because conservatives are!
One side being worse isn't an excuse for the other being bad.
Regarding EVs, the US started to fall behind in 2019, and the gap has only continued to widen, regardless of administration:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electric-car-sales-share?...
Electric buses should be a no-brainer, yet New York comes last among US states in a recent market survey:
https://theicct.org/publication/zero-emission-bus-and-truck-...
They could (and should be required to) build out their own solar/wind/battery infra as part of standing up a new datacenter. So much money is being wasted on poisoning our air and further enriching the richest companies in the history of the world.
"Fast enough" for what?
It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.
Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.
The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.
For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
Natural gas generators are also a supply bottleneck. https://www.naturalgasintel.com/news/turbine-shortage-threat...
_decent, clean_ gas generators have a bottleneck
cheap, dirty, loud "tbh. shouldn't exist" kind fo gas generators are far more available and what is widely used
but also huge part of the solar supply bottleneck is artificial due to import regulations from china and both the US and EU having failed to secure meaningful domestic solar supply chains.
»It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar.«
No, it's just physics.
no, it's not physics but politics which are the problem here
America produces a ton of LNG. Its cheap and corporations will ALWAYS choose cheap unless the government steps in.
I would assume that training pales in comparison to inference when it comes to energy use, taking into account the number of inference users
I wouldn't assume that. I would wish to see numbers on that first.
Elon has aligned with the hard-right. He'd rather own the libs and hurt the global south than do that.
»Don't understand why.«
Because you cannot turn a large datacenter with thousands of aggregates, power supplies and so on off and on like a toaster.
Datacenters literally have UPS power supplies to let them gracefully shutdown and start up.
A 4 hour grid battery and a weather forecast would easily let a training run follow energy availability.
when the GPU capex overshadows everything else your idle hardware is burning enormous amounts of money
Are the UPSes actual batteries or just backup generators? If they're generators then that defeats the point. If they're batteries then it's kinda just regular solar then?
But that's the point. It's not like a solar DC would suddenly lose power because of cloud cover. Large scale batteries can provide amble ride through inclement weather to allow a graceful shutdown, and weather forecasts at that scale are accurate enough to predictively model your energy availability.
AI training is unique because it's not interactive workload serving.
I totally can. And if it's powered by solar (low inertia) there's less obligations to supply side, solar panels will just get warmer a tiny bit.
Batteries exist, and are getting better all the time.
You totally can. I've seen cases a rat gnawed a circuit breaker and blacked out a DC. Fires too. It's not an industrial manufacturing facility. Computers can just be shut off and on. There's also nothing needed to bootstrap the other parts like cooling etc.
A rat taking out a DC resulting in a black start event isn't the same thing as being able to turn a DC on and off at will. The thousands of computers in an DC running various bits of software don't just power on like your Windows computer and result in a working data center after a couple of minutes automatically.
The reasons are:
- Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it.
- Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc.
- Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production.
Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types.
They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.
> Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are.
these data centers dont care that much about network throughput - you can sneakernet the training set into place and inference on the text isnt that taxing on the network
there's a reason the ai datacenters are being built wherever the power is cheapest and theres the lowest regulations. there's no real physical location requirement, so you could actually put them close to the solar power generation
Solar works as well as it does only because we’ve spread it out and connected it to a grid. When it is overcast in one spot it is sunny elsewhere.
That “elsewhere” has to be far enough away to get different weather.
This means a grid capable of transferring 100% of the needed power.
So even if you plopped a new DC in the middle of a field of panels you’d still need a ~1 GA grid connection… or a battery array many times the size as you’d otherwise need just to cover night time usage.
All those companies are sitting on literally hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. If they need this so badly, let them build the connection and other infrastructure.
Cash doesn't buy time machines.
They want to build the data centres right now, but the power companies and other energy suppliers are booked solid for 5+ years out.
Money or not, you can't just click your fingers and instantly get regulatory approval, or spin up a facility to build parts that only a handful of places have ever figured out how to mass-manufacture.
Gas turbine blades are especially difficult, but batteries and panels are not far behind. There are a surprisingly small number of shops capable of making power switching gear and transformers too.
> They want to build the data centres right now,
And I want them to behave in a decent way, but universe does not ensure we get what we want.
They should be forced to build a grid in a way that does not speeds up global warming. What they want should be irrelevant.
I hope you get paid for apologizing for the worst people in the world.
When you spend many billions buying GPUs, you want to maximize utilization, and not turn them off during the night.
When you spend many millions buying a government, you want to maximize your return on that investment, not just play by the rules like everyone else.
You could argue that Musk spent 44 billions buying that.
I don't see why this isn't obvious. Terafab is a FAB not a datacenter.
Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
In modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days.
There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
If you run a washing machine sure.
If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.
Building gas power plants that run only a few weeks per year is very expensive. Just compare prices in Germany (gas) with China (coal) or Finland (nuclear).
A more economical way would be to build nuclear power plants that power electrolyzers most of the time and provide power to the grid when necessary.
In the US, gas power plants make more sense due to ridiculously cheap gas, but even then the capacity factor of those power plants is much higher than 10%.
Or we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
Comparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think?
Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind.
I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
Where available is limited to Norway. Building enough mountains per capita in the rest of the world is somewhat difficult.
You've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts?
In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc.
Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan.
You also don't have to build mountains to utilize hydro. There are areas that are utilizing pumped hydro to store the kinetic energy to smooth the baseline.
I've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.
Oh you ran the numbers!? If only you had led with that.
Even China has seen a stark reduction in the percentage of electricity generated from coal plants over the past decade. Are they deindustrializing?
Everyone knows coal is a dead end. Maybe you should run the numbers again.
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china#what-sources...
That's a funny statistic to focus on when the actual use of coal for electricity has increased by 50% over the same period.
It's almost like they are using it to cover baseload or something.
You realize that link shows the exact opposite of what you're saying it shows, right?
It shows that the percentage share of electricity generated from coal in China peaked at ~80% in 2007 and was at ~54% last year.
You do realize that Chinese electricity production quadrupled in that time?
Yes - what's your point? It seems like coal wasn't the golden ticket you're making it out to be so they built alternatives.
Do you understand what baseload means?
Yep and China is leading the world in recent and active construction of traditional hydro (dams) and pumped hydro storage to reduce their reliance on coal for baseload. I'm done with your bad-faith arguments.
Their 30 year plan is to move to nuclear for base load, and they are on track to manage it. The only people who think China is moving to a pre 2020 like western grid are people who don't know the first thing about China.
The above listed Washington, Idaho, Vermont, and Oregon are all industrialized societies.
Hydro is the primary source of electricity in Canada, around 60%.
Quebec produces far more electricity via hydro than any single US state, some of which gets exported to the northeastern US.
Clearly there is no industry in Canada then! /s
Unplug a ventilator for five minutes and a patient dies.
If unplugging a data center for five minutes can have a similar effect, then every AWS or cloudflare outage would have been a mass extinction event.
Idk. about any specific data center but many of this data centers aren't for AI training / making advancements on the AI race. They have sufficient resources for that already AFIK.
They are to run AI, so that the 100th app can force an AI agent down your throat weather your want or not /s. (Or in more optimistic words, so that the AI adoption can spread as fast as their is demand.)
Inference almost certainly dominates training workloads at this point and that can only be expected to continue to become more lopsided
Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027...
That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones)
A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far)
Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a data center of a super computer in the mittle of a city and there where no sound issues at all (through yes it was a special case in many ways).
I mean yes, it costs more and many well established companies for high quality gas turbines are booked out.
Still using the kind of gas turbines which can bring back literal acid rain shouldn't be an option at all.
Lets also not speak about the environmental/health damage the production of the natural gas through fracking does.
Which bring us to a common nonsense argument, people going on and on about hoe economically expensive/harmful climate protection is, but totally missing that many oft he circumvented laws are not for climate protection but are for environmental protection for the sake of humans health.
To make thinks worse most of this data centers seems to be more about making money, then being in any way relevant for winning any AI race...
They probably take portable ones so they can claim it's not a permanent installation and they can skip a lot of planning permission that way.
Problem is all the (relatively) efficient and (relatively) quiet turbines have long since been snapped up, so the AI sloppers have to go with inefficient, noisy ones for the foreseeable future. And given that no-one knows when the AI bubble will finally burst, no manufacturer wants to sink hundreds of millions into new plant to produce turbines in a year or two when the sloppers may be barely alive on taxpayer cash injections.
No, there are extreme consequences only when toes are stepped on. For example SBF... If it was run by Musk or Trump you can be sure there would be no sentence. I'm not arguing what SBF did isn't a crime. I'm saying if that deserves 20 years, then everything else should also be equally punished.
White collar crime is the only crime that should be eligible for the death penalty.
I don't support the death penalty at all but I have to admit I think society would be better off than what we currently have
Some thoughts:
* you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).
* running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).
* the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.
* The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.
* in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.
Gas is ridiculously cheap in the US while it's often the most expensive source of electricity in the rest of the world.
We're currently seeing a bifurcation where Asia bets on anything but oil and gas while the US goes in the opposite direction. Note that anything but oil and gas includes coal, so this isn't about the environment.
> you can run data centres on grid electricity
The reason they're not doing that is because grid providers can't grow their supply fast enough to support new AI data centres.
Yes, they said that.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
256 comments, 8 hours ago
At least these sites (its more than Amazon) are being built near the energy source they will consume. Straight out of the ground into a turbine and then into the electron spinners.
Also there's not a lot of anything where these sites are located (Near El Paso). The 4-5 Road Runners who live around there will probably appreciate the change.
West Texas is basically Mad Max 2.
No one cares about West Texas, it's about the 33 million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and warming the world.
Reminder that the USA are the country that historically burned the most fossil fuels, the world's largest extractor of oil, the only country trying to do a 180 on coal power.
Half of the world has experienced unprecedented heatwaves that will become the norm in 2050.
Stop burning fossil fuels.
Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones.
efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics
it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)
but concentration definitely will rise
sometime in the energy sector once told me "the solution to pollution is dilution"
Which is nonsense. There's plenty of pollution that's been diluted as much as it possibly can be and is still problematic. CO2 is an obvious example. Or consider leaded gasoline or mercury. You have to be careful not to eat too much fish or you'll have trouble with the mercury in it. That's been diluted by the entire ocean and that didn't solve it.
uh, that’s nonsense.
co2 is problematic because of concentration - the sheer volume.
leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration.
dilution still helps!
Of course it helps, but where are you going to dilute more co2 these days?
that is exactly the issue. still worse 6” from the tailpipe.
bulk volume is a different problem from concentration
when people suffocate in the fire from CO2 - that's concentration
and dilution helps people to not literally die from that
global warming due to CO2 levels everywhere is entirely different problem. (and if we could dilute CO2 into the space, it would also be solved, lol)
The quip doesn't say "dilution helps." It says "the solution to pollution is dilution." Dilution solves the problem. And not only that, but it's the solution, not merely a solution.
This is just not true, and you seem to agree with that.
Yes, CO2 is problematic because of the sheer volume. The sheer volume means that dilution does not solve the problem.
Leaded gas and mercury are a problem because of bio-concentration. Which means that dilution does not solve the problem.
They meant "to not get caught, we just dilute".
*someone in the energy sector
also, i don't necessarily mean to endorse this worldview in terms of its potential impact on policy, though there may be some truth to it, technically speaking.
If we all just get a little cancer instead of some people getting a LOT of cancer then Amazon will be able to power its robot factories!
A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?
Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.
A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.
> Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery?
It's more capital intensive, and interest rates are 8%, because our elected officials are completely incompetent.
8% interest rates don’t seem to be a problem for financing all the data centers and AI hardware.
Amazon can afford to power their data centers with clean energy.
It’s not called “Climate Pledge But Only If It’s Less Capital Intensive Arena”
I am curious how renewables + battery compare here, if at all feasible.
I thought there was a gas turbine shortage?
They’re absolutely not that incompetent. They’re on the pockets of people who profit directly from this.
Follow the money, and all that.
I don’t think business really wants interest rates that high. Without conspiracy theories, a simpler explanation is that this is simply democracy in action. People don’t want the spending reigned in, and they don’t want their taxes raised.
I think in this thread it’s worth posting out that interest rates aren’t actually high historically. They’re pretty normal. They were just wildly low for around a decade or so.
If you look at a 30-year fixed mortgage chart, the <6% rate situation only existed between roughly 2008 and 2021. At no other time in the history of the 30-year fixed rate mortgage was it ever that low. Ever.
I'm absoltutely not defending the environmental decision, but these datacenter projects seem to be funded mostly by free cash flow (not borrowed money), from the hyperscaler profit margins.
A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
Natural gas is basically a waste product that gets flared off in many oil-producing parts of Texas. If this private power plant can use that gas for something productive then I guess at least we're no worse off. But it's not clear that is what is happening.
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-... Solar dc data centers are marginally cheaper. However right now the incentives are on buliding data centers (including power sources) the fastest. Despite this i would bet that you could build solar and batteries as fast as (or even faster) as building gas power plants, but the current governmend really likes to see fossils and setting the planet on fire.
Permitted maximum of 10 grams(2 nickels) of CO2 per hour for every person in the US. 33 million tons * 2000 ton/pound * 454 g/pound / 365 days in a year / 24 hours in a day / 342.6M people in us = 9.984 grams
It's important to distinguish the toxic SOX/NOX emissions from CO2 which is not toxic but is a greenhouse gas. These two categories and materially different and conflating them is very risky. For example if this were to replace an equivalently sized coal plant it would be a net improvement
Carbon tax would shift the economics in favor of renewables.
I don’t think it would - tokens are so profitable and the race dynamics make the deployment timelines for most renewables untenable.
Throughput for solar projects is very high and increasing, latency is unfortunately also very high.
Carbon tax is the only way, you need to pay for picking up the garbage from the road or the air, the cost to clean op pollution and trash needs to be accounted for.
A carbon tax would have been a fantastic solution in the 1990s
It is too late now. There are no pare to optimal solutions left
Someone’s gotta stop this who idk - that’s the problem
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
At this point, there are enough commenters in both threads to justify a merger.
It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.
Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.
Not if the benefits of automating basically all forms of labor reach them.
Might be benefits, might be downsides.
So they can have cancer and not work... I guess that's better then working and having cancer. Or the people just starve instead so we don't have to worry about the pollution.
Reach them? You mean reach Elon Musk.
We have fully automated AI slop TikTok feeds and it only cost the earth.
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for sharebolders
the benefits of unemployment
I agree, America should finally build more nuclear power plants.
China is currently building 37 reactors simultaneously [1].
> [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-c...
Have you seen the nuclear plant disasters that need a thousand years to clean up? Two of them so far and it hasn’t even been a century
Making this argument is a strong indicator that you are extremely under-educated on this subject or motivated to make dishonest arguments.
There are a variety of commercial reactor design families that CANNOT melt down. Literally impossible for have a Chernobyl or Fukushima from the designs. These are not new. There is no reason anyone feeling like they know enough to contribute to this sort of discussion should be unaware. HTGRs, MSRs, SMRs, LMRs, SFRs...
"Sometimes nuclear plants melt down and cause widespread problems for very long timescales" is a nonsense argument to use against "We should build new reactors" when the new reactor designs we would be building can't melt down.
Yes, but those are a priority below massive solar and wind deployment because nuclear is another way to say emissions will rise for decades before the plants come online and start displacing fossil fuels. There are a few edge cases where nuclear might be necessary but there is an enormous amount of fossil fuel usage which could easily be replaced except for political capture by the oil and coal industries.
Nuclear is good for the last 10% (and very contextually - it maybe makes a lot of sense in Alaska but far less sense in Arizona, for example), but mostly we should be building more solar/wind/batteries, as they can be built both faster and increasingly cheaper over time (the cost of batteries has dropped ~97% in the last 20 years IIRC, solar and wind have similarly been dropping in price).
The main argument for nuclear besides "baseload" is that nuclear plants can potentially last for a century and will thus amortise its capex quite easily and afterwards become relatively cheap for most of its life. Except, given just how quickly solar is dropping right now, it's unreasonable to assume that 50+ years from now (so, in ~2076) already-built nuclear will be cheaper than contemporary solar tech (I.e. solar panels built in 2075). In fact, it's unreasonable to assume that nuclear plants will necessarily be longer-lasting than future solar panels, given current research into self-healing solar panels (which clearly isn't commercially ready, but very likely will be within 50 years). Even if they can only self-heal 3 times, that's 4x the lifetime for 120 years total, and much longer if the base lifetime of the panel is more than 30 years. And frankly nuclear will never beat solar panels on operational costs - nuclear has a 24/7 guard, a nuclear reactor and a turbine, whereas the closest thing PV has to moving parts is the de-dusting machines.
Similar logic for solar also applies to wind and batteries, of course - their price has been dropping like a rock for decades. And that compounds - if both solar and batteries get twice as cheap and their lifetime lasts twice as long, then the whole package becomes 4x cheaper. And the cheaper wind turbines get, the fewer batteries solar needs to plug the holes in intermittent generation.
A quick aside: a lot of focus on solar lifetimes assumes the minimum will be the average, but e.g. 1980s solar panels are still in operation with only 10-20% performance degradation IIRC so the popular assumption that solar panels last only 30 years seems a bit ridiculous.
China's nuclear stats should be kept in perspective by the way: IIRC ~90% of the generation they're building is non-nuclear renewables. They're also building more of basically everything than the rest of the world combined, so an absolute stat like "they're building 37 of X" isn't particularly useful except for conveying that China is building a lot of stuff.
To repeat, though: the US should still build nuclear plants (unless/until they get financially blitzed by renewables). My point here is to keep it in perspective.
And I don't mean to insinuate you said otherwise, I'm just kind of pre-emptively responding to a stereotype/common set of associated arguments, I guess.
These lucky Texans get to enjoy all this AI data center natural gas powerplant pollution.
Finally, a structure worthy of its namesake.
These jet engine gas turbines create air pollution in the forms of formaldehyde and NOx and noise pollution.
> That’s in sharp contrast to Amazon’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040...
Liars
Alternatives exist but they aren't free...
https://www.aga.org/decarbonizing-through-carbon-capture/
https://www.energyindepth.org/study-finds-carbon-capture-and...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277265682...
TIL mentioning a viable technology that would reduce emissions here but delay a forced transition to renewables is an instant downvote.
Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.
Politics is the art of the possible, not the ideal. Vote that down too I guess.
Also, I call BS on your claim it's not working anywhere at scale.
https://www.catf.us/resource/carbon-capture-storage-what-can...
What do you want? To keep chasing the perfect or to embrace digging ourselves out of this mess by whatever means? I think I know the answer and I'll bet we disagree.
But I too would prefer we pivoted to renewables and nuclear, increasingly renewables over nuclear with time, but I'd have to move to China for that (yet they ended up firing up the coal plants because of the Iran War). It's not happening here even when the free market indicates it's the best play because it undercuts oil and gas and they own the politicians as the masses mostly don't bother to vote. What is your plan that works in reality as opposed to the Aldous Huxley semi-dystopia the west has become? I know, I know, getting the job done by any means is wrong think, demanding perfection is right think.
I’m basing it on things like https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2026.121752 finding that it’s going to be hard both to scale up and get past 90% unless we have massive amounts of clean energy available. To me that means that we shouldn’t be approving any new fossil emissions and treating capture / sequestration as a nice bonus if we can make it work rather than something we can count on the make the numbers work.
The best thing I see is that economic pressure is mounting: even with Trump breaking so many laws on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, people want to deploy solar or wind power because that saves them money.
From the paper you cite, here's the thing:
"The decarbonization of industrial hard-to-abate sectors through CCUS is critical, and that can be illustrated by looking at the target sources, such as the cement industry, accountable for 6–7% of global anthropogenic emissions [1]; or the steel manufacturing value chain, responsible for 7% of global energy-related emissions [2]. Given such dimensions, it can be concluded that carbon capture is critical to achieving CO2 restriction goals."
"In the cement industry it is worth highlighting that 60–70% of the total emissions of CO2 does not come from fuel combustion, but from the decomposition of the limestone into calcium oxide and CO2 "
So you can't get past 90% in the first place without carbon sequestration.
We have the same goal, but we see different paths to achieving it. I think if we do what it takes with carbon sequestration, the free market solves this for real as more and more profitable renewable power generation is stood up. But I do not believe that happens without the fossil fuel incumbents soft landing or finding bagholders to take the hit in the long run. And I won't count on Americans to demand better given all it took was the president to say he hates EVs and EV sales plummeted.
Personally, my house is more or less off the grid electrically already with a ton of solar panels and 75 kWH of battery backup. I voted with my wallet.
Viable?
Currently the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the planet has failed to meet it's goals. Had it actually met the design goals it would be part of an LNG power source that manages to reclaim only 80% of the CO2 it releases.
That's not net zero, it falls short, and that's a good attempt but hardly viable.
The desired goal is to eliminate further emissions and also go further and claw back some of those gigatonnes of previously sequestered CO2 released by humans over the past century.
* A climate solution or distraction? - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-18/chevron-gorgon-fails-...
* ‘A shocking failure’: Chevron criticised for missing carbon capture target - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/a-shocki...
We have viable green technologies for power generation. We just don't penalize the polluters properly.
> 7.65 gigawatt gas power plant
This is another level of insanity, right there.
Second largest hydrocarbon power generator in the world. Unreal.
"Shareholder Value Pledge Arena"
I like this for the clarity. No more wishy-washy Is Amazon Evil?
It's just Amazon ~ Fuck Yeah We're Evil