As the Trump administration's “big, beautiful bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.
So… I considered trying to start an energy-sustainable data center…
The math doesn’t check out. One square meter of earth gets about 1,000 watts from sunlight. Our current solar panels only run at 20% efficiency at best. Servers I looked at average 500 watts… and we usually put a bunch of servers stacked up in a single rack, which you can only fit one of in one square meter.
As AI grows, it’s only gonna get worse. We need nuclear or geothermal or hell, fusion if we can make it not 50 years away.
But it explains why Amazon and such are looking into smaller scale nuclear. Let’s see how that goes I guess…
Edit: I’m not saying solar is a bad idea. We just need more energy production of many sorts
Your numbers are old. If you are building today with anyone ad much as mentioning AI, you might as well consider 100kW/rack as ”normal”. An off-the-shelf CPU today runs at 500W, and you usually have two of them per server, along with memory, storage and networking. With old school 1U pizza boxes, that’s basically 100kW/rack. If you start adding GPUs, just double or quadruple power density right off the bat. Of course, assume everything is direct liquid cooled.
So… I considered trying to start an energy-sustainable data center…
The math doesn’t check out. One square meter of earth gets about 1,000 watts from sunlight. Our current solar panels only run at 20% efficiency at best. Servers I looked at average 500 watts… and we usually put a bunch of servers stacked up in a single rack, which you can only fit one of in one square meter.
As AI grows, it’s only gonna get worse. We need nuclear or geothermal or hell, fusion if we can make it not 50 years away.
But it explains why Amazon and such are looking into smaller scale nuclear. Let’s see how that goes I guess…
Edit: I’m not saying solar is a bad idea. We just need more energy production of many sorts
Your numbers are old. If you are building today with anyone ad much as mentioning AI, you might as well consider 100kW/rack as ”normal”. An off-the-shelf CPU today runs at 500W, and you usually have two of them per server, along with memory, storage and networking. With old school 1U pizza boxes, that’s basically 100kW/rack. If you start adding GPUs, just double or quadruple power density right off the bat. Of course, assume everything is direct liquid cooled.