Even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity, almost all of the world's demand is being served by a very few select locations. So you can still have this issue where you're basically powering the entire um world's AI demand from a few centers in the US and and and a few other data centers across the world. And that's a really really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.
You might also like
In the case of Anthropic, the revenue has gone as high as $50 million per megawatt. What that now enables them to do is: 'Hey, if I spend 10 bucks on inference capacity, I actually generate 50 bucks of revenue, and then I can turn around and incrementally spend all of that profit on training.'
Dylan Patel
These companies were largely built around the winning assets of the previous energy system: oil fields, refineries, pipelines, tankers, centralized generation, poles, and wires. The energy transition that's been underway has already created new bottlenecks – the grid struggles matching variable supply with unpredictable demand, for example – and therefore new valuable positions. Then the most ravenous consumer of electrons in history entered the market in the form of data centers.
Packy McCormick
Our elected officials who were meeting with Amazon all signed NDAs for how much water it would use to cool their servers. My question to them was and still is: How are we supposed to know if they're getting close to the limitations of our freshwater aquifer if we don't know how much water they're using?
Peter Rubin