> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers.
This is great, but do they have an actual example of something that would have been passed on to consumers? Or is it just a hypothetical?
In the location I’m familiar with, large infrastructure projects have to pay their own interconnection costs. Utilities are diverse across the country so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences, but in general I doubt there are many situations where utilities were going to raise consumer’s monthly rates specifically to connect some large commercial infrastructure.
Maybe someone more familiar with these locations can provide more details, but I think this public promise is rather easy to make.
There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses.
However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone:
A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices.
And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.
There's only one way to resolve this - datacenters to build their own energy generation, not connected to the grid, just local. Otherwise, they'll muddy the water to no end until they manage to saddle the rest of us with their energy costs.
The muddied water is just supply and demand. If a datacenter increases demand for electricians, natural gas, solar panels, copper, whatever else, then the price will have to go up. The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.
The demand is still there, connected to the grid or not. The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways (and less resilient in other ways), which is why the grid came about in the first place.
> The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.
That's not the question, we aren't discussing trivialities like what change of supply is necessary for satisfying increased demand, that's like discussing "is water wet" or "do you need more or less water to satisfy your thirst for water".
The real question is Who is going to pay for building the additional supply?
Residential and other prior customers have already paid the capex for the existing supply and now you want them to pay the capex for enormous amounts of new capacity which the AI corps convert exclusively into their own revenue.
The public is already paying through the nose for new semiconductor capacity because the same scam-geniuses cornered the RAM, GPU and related chips market and they are mercilessly scalping it too, again at the expense of the public.
> The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways
In a perfect world it can, in this world it makes things more unstable and far more unfair when large new consumers use it for their exclusive revenue extraction while pretending that the new capacity is somehow benefiting everybody instead of just them.
> The muddied water is just supply and demand.
Indeed, "just supply and demand" is the mud in the eyes.
North Carolina passed Senate Bill 266, changing how utilities can recover costs for projects under construction amid rising energy demand, particularly from data centers. Now Duke Energy wants a double digit price rate increase: https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-...
Amazon tried to buy an existing nuclear plant's output from a company called Talen for a datacenters colocated with the nuclear plant. They would do a special deal so the electricity they bought wouldn't go via the shared grid.
It got blocked by FERC as it would raise other consumers' energy prices and the deal wasn't fully transparent (probably intentionally so they could shift costs onto others).
Georgia power already has a demand scaled recovery charge addition to bills that increases prices for residential customers regardless of where the demand originates. It used to be only applied occasionally during the summer. Now they've adjusted the peak / off-peak rates to be what it used to be plus the demand recovery, and now the demand recovery is additional and just applies pretty much all the time.
Generally most distribution costs are socialized starting with the REA and such. My block needed a new transformer a few weeks ago and it will be paid for by every customer of that utility.
"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome."
> Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years.
These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient.
If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant.
Simplistically, during 8 hours of work a human would consume 10 kWH of electricity + 27 gallons of water. Sped up by 5%, that drops by 0.5kWH and 1.35 gallons. Even assuming a higher end of resources used by LLMs, a 100 large prompts (~1 every 5 minutes) would only consume 0.25 kWH + 0.3 gallons. So we're still saving ~0.25 kWH + 1 gallon overall per day!
That is, humans + LLMs are way more efficient than humans alone. As such, the more knowledge workers adopt LLMs, the more efficiently they can achieve the same work output!
If we assume a conservative 10% productivity speed up, adoption across all ~100M knowledge work in the US will recoup the resource cost of a full training run in a few business days, even after accounting for the inference costs!
Additional reading with more useful numbers (independent of my napkin math):
So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.
Resource consumption often goes up. It's a time vs energy tradeoff and it's not free.
Your question is a variant of what do we do with all those humans now that they don't have to walk miles to the well every day because we invented aqueducts? The point is that they didn't want to walk to the well but they had to (and in some places they still have to) and very few people want to work, even now and even us, but they have to.
We will see what happens this time when we won't have to walk to that well.
> So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Soon enough, we won't be able to avoid this question.
The thing is, there are many interplaying dynamics here that are impossible to unravel. This is why I called it "napkin math", because figuring out the full ramifications of this change is a pretty large economic problem that nobody has figured out!
But even then, the productivity per human will explode, and we will still have the problem of "too many humans." Cynically, if most knowledge workers get laid off, it's good from an environmental perspective because that means much less commuting and pollution! But then they're starving and we will have riots!
This is where I foresee the near-term problems with GenAI: social turmoil rather than resource consumption. I suspect it's not all bad news though. While it's impossible to put numbers on it, it helps to think about the first-order economic principles that are in play:
1. This is hand-wavy, but knowledge work boosts economic growth. If this is massively accelerated, we should be creating surplus value that compensates for a lot of costs.
2. However a huge chunk of knowledge work is busy work which will be automated away. People can try upskilling but the skill gap is already huge an growing quickly and they will lose jobs.
3. The economy is essentially people providing and paying for services and goods. If people lose jobs and cannot earn, they cannot drive the economy and it shrinks.
4. The elite, counter-intuitively enough, do NOT want that because they get richer by taking a massive cut of the economy! (Not to mention life in a doomsday bunker can get pretty dull if starving people start rioting -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896066)
There are many more dynamics at play of course, but I think an equilibrium will be found purely because everyone is incentivized to find a solution (UBI?) that keeps both the elites and the plebes living long and prospering. I expect some turmoil, but luckily, the severe resource crunch of GPUs gives us time to figure things out.
I have no expertise here, but a couple years ago I had a prototype using locally deployed Llama 2 that cached the context (now deprecated https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/10576) from previous inference calls, and reused it for subsequent calls. The subsequent calls were much much faster. I suspect prompt caching works similarly, especially given changed code is very small compered to the rest of the codebase.
Since their example scales the water consumption with their electricity consumption one may conclude it was the fresh water consumed (evaporated) during production of the electricity. Gaseous H2O is an even more potent GHG than CO2.
In the initial analysis of a single worker, yes, but when scaling up per-human savings to use by the wider population, the aggregate resource savings compensate for training resource usage within a few days, weeks at most.
Adding new electricity demand to the grid should not be viewed as breaking windows and robbing others. When I bought an EV, I increased my electricity demand a huge amount, but it's not like I'm stealing from my neighbors. No rules were broken. We just need to make sure that I pay enough for my additional demand.
> AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years.
The error bars on this prediction are extremely large. It would represent a 5% increase in capacity in "the next several years" which is only a percent or two per year, but it could also only be 5GW over the next several years. 50GW represents about 1 year of actual grid additions.
> All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
I'm not building these things, and I think there should be AI critique, but this is far over the top. There's great value for all of humanity in these tools. The actual energy use of a typical user is not much more than a typical home appliance, because so many requests are batched together and processed in parallel.
We should be ashamed of getting into our cars every day, that's a true harm to the environment. We should have built something better, allowed more transit. A daily commute of 30 miles is disastrous for the environment compared other any AI use that's really possible at the moment.
Let's be cautious of AI but keep our critiques grounded in reality, so that we have enough powder left to fight the rest of things we need to change in society.
> "Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome."
Buying electricity isn't inherently destructive. That's a very bad analogy.
> These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
I'm not arguing that they are efficient right now, but how would you measure that? What kind of output does it have to make per kWh of input to be acceptable? Keep in mind that the baseline of US power use is around 500GW and that currently AI is maybe 10.
A human consumes about 100 watts when not doing any physical exertion (round number, rule of thumb). So unless you can show an LLM running on 100w compute with capabilities similar to a human, they’re less efficient.
100 W is only the start. Let's say that I consume 100 W all along the day. I use an LLM for coding assistance in the old way of asking questions and copy pasting code. It's much faster than me at writing that code. I don't think it ever works 1 hour for me per day. It's probably 10 cumulative minutes, probably much less. Round it up to 12 minutes to make it 1/5 of a hour or round it down to 6 minutes for a 1/10. So instead of 24 it's 0.1 hours, 240 times less. Those 100 W could be 24000 W and the total power per day would be the same. Is that LLM consuming 24 kW when working for me? No idea but I hope it's less than that.
Of course I could do all of my coding alone again, but I would be slower. It's like walking to the mall several times per week, several hours per time, instead of once or twice per week with a car, three cumulative hours. I trade a higher energy consumption for more time to do other things and the ability to live far away from shops.
Right, but you do stuff other than work 24 hours a day, right? You have fun, relax, etc.
Counting the 100w for 24 hours for a human doesn’t match up with counting the power usage from “AI” for only the 10 minutes it’s doing a task.
Also - units issue: 100 watts for a day is 2400 watt-hours. It’s a moot point anyway because the power draw for the frontier models is an order of magnitude off that the division by 24 is basically meaningless.
We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase.
These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation.
I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.
> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.
This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small compared to that. Let alone flying. Personally, even if my "AI emissions" are at 10x his estimated usage (they almost certainly aren't), the other sacrifices I make to reduce emissions have such an impact that I'd still be multiple times below the national average.
Note how the above measures energy usage (kWh), not emissions. For anyone taking fossil fuel transit regularly, whether ICE car/taxi/airplane, AI usage is all but guaranteed to be meaningless compared to their transport emissions. One hamburger is at least 5x more emissions than his "median say with Claude Code", so there's another one. If you're feeling guilty, track how much beef you're eating, cut it down by 20% and use agents to your hearts content.
Now of course, a different form of AI usage like image generation and especially video generation is incomparably more energy-intensive per query. We'd need separate math on that.
It’s not clear from the article, but do these statistics taken into account the amount of electricity and water required to train the model in addition to inference?
For example, the article says their daily average use of Claude code is similar to the dishwasher running. Is that just including inference or also training Opus 4.5?
This is a great question. To my understanding the industry consensus is that for the big three providers, energy spend on inference had already surpassed training by summer last year, and the former's share only keeps increasing. The problem is that there's no hard data in public.
What we need to do here is write an article that makes a wild claim in either direction ("99% is inference!"), post it on HN, and wait for the comments to roll in that prove it right or wrong.
That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code, in truth.
The key word is "feel" which has a direct and causal relationship to societal programming which is directly impacted if not dictated by media/marketing _ both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using AND it's markup which is ostensibly used for marketing and the consumption guilt "feeling" feedback loop grows.
I agree with your statement, but the difference is we all will pay higher electricity costs whether we use it or not. That's the difference between Mc.D's and AI.
Yet another example of socialize the costs, privatize the profits (except AI isn't profitable yet, lol)
But that too goes for the others all the same. We all pay with our health because some people fly with private jets, or drive Lambos, or indeed eat hamburgers every day. Our health being quite the more precious resource than our money.
But even on the subject of electricity costs. It looks like the biggest electricity consuming sector globally is.. the oil industry! So we're back to the Lambo drivers.
> sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens
There's nothing particularly worse about money spent on AI vs. anything else. I don't feel guilty for having 6 shirts even though I can only wear one at a time.
> how our planet will survive this critical phase.
> trillions in valuation.
This is more or less literally the "yes we destroyed the planet, but for a brief moment we created trillions in shareholder value" meme. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask to what extent this benefits humans as humans, not as economic units. Especially given the explicit threat in the AI marketing material to destroy all creative industries and replace human fulfilment and even connection with AI.
There are people who recognize there is a problem and would support collective action to fix it, and there are those that don't. As long as you are in the first group, there's nothing else you can individually do to make a difference.
What if I was in the first group, but abandoned them after being lied to? Told how important it was for ME to take public transit and drive an EV, only for AI to march in and consume multiple nation's worth of energy. That's not "collective" , that's "rules for thee but not for me".
Well yeah, I agree, collective action would be actually collective. I'm not gonna try to prescribe something like taxes or infrastructure changes, but stuff like that.
You're just describing individual action, which like you said, isn't gonna do anything.
One of the potential upsides of AI in the USA is we'll bring down electrical prices compared to something like China. Power has to be abundantly plentiful and concentrated.
Maybe then, we could afford to smelt an ingot of aluminum in the USA.
Until then, I guess we're just sadly just burning coal to create cat memes. I hope Anthropic can lead the charge. Crypto was already a massive setback in terms of clean power, AI is already very dirty.
How will that happen? China is building more generation as we speak. And I mean a lot. The gap is widening and the rate of change is even worse, thanks to "clean beautiful coal" or whatever Trump said.
You are aware that China is building dozens of new coal power plants right? Just this year they have commissioned 50.[1] Granted, it's less than before, but still much more than other developed countries.
Yes, I am aware. They are increasing the energy output gap so much it's laughable, including coal. The MAGA administration isn't even building coal properly, but they are shuttering wind and solar. Wow, America! So much winning. China will catch up much sooner than anyone could believe thanks to GOP.
Wind and solar combined generation increased by 12.2% during the first 11 months of 2025, providing 19% of total US electricity compared to 17.3% during the same period in 2024.
Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin? The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.
> Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin?
That's a reasonable assumption. At the same time, I don't know that you can neatly attribute things happening during one adminstration to the prior administration. We need more rigorous analysis than that. For instance, the economy tends to do better under Democratic than Republican rule, but using your lag mental model we should then actually ascribe it to Republic policy? Back to energy, notably, in Jul 2025, more coal was added than wind... should we ascribe that to the prior admin due to lag?
> The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.
Yes, that's clear. They are very hostile in rhetoric and action.
The administration characterizes wind and solar as expensive and unreliable energy sources that have been subsidized by taxpayers for too long. In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate subsidies for wind and solar in accordance with the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act". On his first day in office, Trump issued an order blocking the government from auctioning off the rights to build wind farms on public lands or in public waters. The administration has halted already-issued permits for offshore wind projects and suspended leases for five major wind projects in December. Solar and wind projects are now subject to an elevated review process likely to slow down approval. Tax credits for renewable energy projects were restricted, requiring projects to begin construction within a year or produce electricity by 2028.
The adminstration prefers fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal), hydropower, nuclear energy, and critical minerals as domestic energy resources.
Despite all that, 2026 is still projected to have 99%+ new capacity in 2026 to be solar, wind, and storage.
Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop.
But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure).
But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
Rather have the government tax these entities (great way to have the public support a VAT in this instance) than rely on their "benefactors" that have shown zero remorse in the societal destruction against the planet and humanity, but okay.
Utilities do charge infrastructure projects for their interconnection costs. Maybe there was some hypothetical situation where some costs would have gone into a general budget, but utilities aren’t usually in the habit of doing large interconnection projects for free and sending the bills to consumers.
So the interconnect costs cover the infrastructure buildout to generate the additional power demands, or that’s spread across all consumers in perpetuity? Because the interconnect itself is the cheap part afaik. And all of our rates go up to cover the costs of the additional generation whether it’s another solar farm or another ng plant.
They don’t generally just have GW of power sitting idle for a rainy day (I’m not talking about the capacity they reserve for hot july days).
Electricity price is a weird beast. Everyone has to pay the price of the most expensive electricity source (generally gas plants) that was recruited to respond to the power demand. It means that during a spike the electricity price can double or triple.
What I infer from Anthropic post is that they will estimate the energy price as if they weren't using it and pay the difference if their use upped the price.
Gas plants are only the most expensive in the simple cycle configuration. Combined cycle plants are competitive with other forms of baseload generation. The trouble is the response time.
With day ahead forecasting, we can try to turn that peak load into base load. Grid operations are a non trivial part in how this AI energy situation plays out.
Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.
disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out.
First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries.
They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.
Shouldn't future contract sellers be smart enough to take these aspects in account? So you might not pay the spot price. But overall you will cover it. As those selling futures are there to make money. So they charge more than they pay for the power.
I see this as another OPEX expenditure that has to be factored into Anthropic’s (hypothetical) profitability, and am intrigued as to what this means in an industry that is becoming rife with CAPEX sinks…
This is all good and well wishes as long as investors are willing to pour money into the bubble. When the music stops is where we will see the true colors. Corporations are optimized to make money, governments should be optimized to protect people.
for the simple reason that other energy consuming industries have physical products in and physical products out, which is costly to transport from space, while uploading extra corpus tokens and downloading new weights is essentially free from space (compared to the hardware shipping costs).
people have been correctly indoctrinated about global warming and the dominant heating terms coming from excess CO2 concentration, but because of this over-emphasis they neglect the prompt heating that comes with nearly all energy generation mechanisms (from fossil fuels, to solar panels to nuclear energy).
when the whole world starts raising their living conditions, and when a computational race erupts, there is no taming of total human energy consumption.
but what we can do is offload the bulk of computational energy consumption, like training common goods such as LLM weights...
Maybe because your tone is needlessly aggressive and lot's of people don't want HN turns into Reddit/Twitter. There is enough people raging on everything on all social networks maybe we are here hopping to have more civilised discussions.
> Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.
One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.
Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.
>One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.
This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy.
> Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.
Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...
Welp, turns out I should verify information better. I thought 6kW seemed high when a 1 square meter solar panel that is ~25% efficient can generate 250W of electricity. My apologies.
I keep saying it, we need to ditch all the "old" styles of power generation YES ncluding green ones like Solar etc. We should all be pushing for SMRs!!!
> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges.
How does paying more monthly cover an infrastructure build out that requires up front capital?
> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges. This includes the shares of these costs that would otherwise be passed onto consumers.
This is great, but do they have an actual example of something that would have been passed on to consumers? Or is it just a hypothetical?
In the location I’m familiar with, large infrastructure projects have to pay their own interconnection costs. Utilities are diverse across the country so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are differences, but in general I doubt there are many situations where utilities were going to raise consumer’s monthly rates specifically to connect some large commercial infrastructure.
Maybe someone more familiar with these locations can provide more details, but I think this public promise is rather easy to make.
There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses.
However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit...
A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices.
And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.
There's only one way to resolve this - datacenters to build their own energy generation, not connected to the grid, just local. Otherwise, they'll muddy the water to no end until they manage to saddle the rest of us with their energy costs.
The muddied water is just supply and demand. If a datacenter increases demand for electricians, natural gas, solar panels, copper, whatever else, then the price will have to go up. The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.
The demand is still there, connected to the grid or not. The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways (and less resilient in other ways), which is why the grid came about in the first place.
> The only thing that can bring prices down in the face of increased demand is increased supply.
That's not the question, we aren't discussing trivialities like what change of supply is necessary for satisfying increased demand, that's like discussing "is water wet" or "do you need more or less water to satisfy your thirst for water".
The real question is Who is going to pay for building the additional supply?
Residential and other prior customers have already paid the capex for the existing supply and now you want them to pay the capex for enormous amounts of new capacity which the AI corps convert exclusively into their own revenue.
The public is already paying through the nose for new semiconductor capacity because the same scam-geniuses cornered the RAM, GPU and related chips market and they are mercilessly scalping it too, again at the expense of the public.
> The grid can help make things more efficient and resilient in some ways
In a perfect world it can, in this world it makes things more unstable and far more unfair when large new consumers use it for their exclusive revenue extraction while pretending that the new capacity is somehow benefiting everybody instead of just them.
> The muddied water is just supply and demand.
Indeed, "just supply and demand" is the mud in the eyes.
North Carolina passed Senate Bill 266, changing how utilities can recover costs for projects under construction amid rising energy demand, particularly from data centers. Now Duke Energy wants a double digit price rate increase: https://starw1.ncuc.gov/NCUC/ViewFile.aspx?Id=0ac12377-99be-...
Putting aside interconnection costs, when electricity is auctioned increased demand can increase wholesale prices for everyone.
Amazon tried to buy an existing nuclear plant's output from a company called Talen for a datacenters colocated with the nuclear plant. They would do a special deal so the electricity they bought wouldn't go via the shared grid.
It got blocked by FERC as it would raise other consumers' energy prices and the deal wasn't fully transparent (probably intentionally so they could shift costs onto others).
Georgia power already has a demand scaled recovery charge addition to bills that increases prices for residential customers regardless of where the demand originates. It used to be only applied occasionally during the summer. Now they've adjusted the peak / off-peak rates to be what it used to be plus the demand recovery, and now the demand recovery is additional and just applies pretty much all the time.
Generally most distribution costs are socialized starting with the REA and such. My block needed a new transformer a few weeks ago and it will be paid for by every customer of that utility.
"Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome."
> Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years.
These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
> These things are so hideously inefficient.
Quite the opposite, really. I did some napkin math for energy and water consumption, and compared to humans these things are very resource efficient.
If LLMs improve productivity by even 5% (studies actually peg productivity gains across various professions at 15 - 30%, and these are from 2024!) the resource savings by accelerating all knowledge workers are significant.
Simplistically, during 8 hours of work a human would consume 10 kWH of electricity + 27 gallons of water. Sped up by 5%, that drops by 0.5kWH and 1.35 gallons. Even assuming a higher end of resources used by LLMs, a 100 large prompts (~1 every 5 minutes) would only consume 0.25 kWH + 0.3 gallons. So we're still saving ~0.25 kWH + 1 gallon overall per day!
That is, humans + LLMs are way more efficient than humans alone. As such, the more knowledge workers adopt LLMs, the more efficiently they can achieve the same work output!
If we assume a conservative 10% productivity speed up, adoption across all ~100M knowledge work in the US will recoup the resource cost of a full training run in a few business days, even after accounting for the inference costs!
Additional reading with more useful numbers (independent of my napkin math):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6
https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...
So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Saying “we can do the same work with less resource use” doesn’t mean resource consumption is reduced. You’ve just gone from humans using resources to humans using the same resources and doing less work, plus AI using more resources.
Resource consumption often goes up. It's a time vs energy tradeoff and it's not free.
Your question is a variant of what do we do with all those humans now that they don't have to walk miles to the well every day because we invented aqueducts? The point is that they didn't want to walk to the well but they had to (and in some places they still have to) and very few people want to work, even now and even us, but they have to.
We will see what happens this time when we won't have to walk to that well.
> So with the AI is doing more of the work and you need less humans, what are you doing with the extra humans to eliminate their no-longer-productive resource consumption?
Soon enough, we won't be able to avoid this question.
You put them to work doing more things than were possible in a month before.
The thing is, there are many interplaying dynamics here that are impossible to unravel. This is why I called it "napkin math", because figuring out the full ramifications of this change is a pretty large economic problem that nobody has figured out!
For instance, I think operating at this level of productivity is unsustainable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938038). As discussed in detail by the recent "AI vampire" blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972179 -- most humans are not designed for that level of cognitive intensity.
But even then, the productivity per human will explode, and we will still have the problem of "too many humans." Cynically, if most knowledge workers get laid off, it's good from an environmental perspective because that means much less commuting and pollution! But then they're starving and we will have riots!
This is where I foresee the near-term problems with GenAI: social turmoil rather than resource consumption. I suspect it's not all bad news though. While it's impossible to put numbers on it, it helps to think about the first-order economic principles that are in play:
1. This is hand-wavy, but knowledge work boosts economic growth. If this is massively accelerated, we should be creating surplus value that compensates for a lot of costs.
2. However a huge chunk of knowledge work is busy work which will be automated away. People can try upskilling but the skill gap is already huge an growing quickly and they will lose jobs.
3. The economy is essentially people providing and paying for services and goods. If people lose jobs and cannot earn, they cannot drive the economy and it shrinks.
4. The elite, counter-intuitively enough, do NOT want that because they get richer by taking a massive cut of the economy! (Not to mention life in a doomsday bunker can get pretty dull if starving people start rioting -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896066)
There are many more dynamics at play of course, but I think an equilibrium will be found purely because everyone is incentivized to find a solution (UBI?) that keeps both the elites and the plebes living long and prospering. I expect some turmoil, but luckily, the severe resource crunch of GPUs gives us time to figure things out.
What I gather from your analysis and gleeful exclamation marks is that I should start rioting now rather than wait.
Hah, interesting, I intended my exclamation marks come across as surprise or emphasis rather than glee!
If it helps better interpret my posts, these days my frame of mind is "We're living in very interesting times" in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...
It’s all so interesting!
Have fun watching the car crash.
Turn them into biogas to create more energy for DCs.
Do keep in mind that 1 large prompt every 5 minutes is not how e.g. coding agents are used. There it's 1 large prompt every couple of seconds.
True, but I think in these scenarios they rely on prompt caching, which is much cheaper: https://ngrok.com/blog/prompt-caching/
I have no expertise here, but a couple years ago I had a prototype using locally deployed Llama 2 that cached the context (now deprecated https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/10576) from previous inference calls, and reused it for subsequent calls. The subsequent calls were much much faster. I suspect prompt caching works similarly, especially given changed code is very small compered to the rest of the codebase.
How is a human consuming 27 gallons of water in an 8 hour work shift?
This includes things like drinking, sanitation, etc. Derived the number from here: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts
Mostly lines up with this reference too, which focuses only on water usage at work: https://quench.culligan.com/blog/average-water-usage-per-per...
Since their example scales the water consumption with their electricity consumption one may conclude it was the fresh water consumed (evaporated) during production of the electricity. Gaseous H2O is an even more potent GHG than CO2.
One burger for lunch is 660 gallons of water. So 27 is actually a very huge underestimation
Are you excluding the cost of training the AI from the calculation?
In the initial analysis of a single worker, yes, but when scaling up per-human savings to use by the wider population, the aggregate resource savings compensate for training resource usage within a few days, weeks at most.
Adding new electricity demand to the grid should not be viewed as breaking windows and robbing others. When I bought an EV, I increased my electricity demand a huge amount, but it's not like I'm stealing from my neighbors. No rules were broken. We just need to make sure that I pay enough for my additional demand.
> AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years.
The error bars on this prediction are extremely large. It would represent a 5% increase in capacity in "the next several years" which is only a percent or two per year, but it could also only be 5GW over the next several years. 50GW represents about 1 year of actual grid additions.
> All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
I'm not building these things, and I think there should be AI critique, but this is far over the top. There's great value for all of humanity in these tools. The actual energy use of a typical user is not much more than a typical home appliance, because so many requests are batched together and processed in parallel.
We should be ashamed of getting into our cars every day, that's a true harm to the environment. We should have built something better, allowed more transit. A daily commute of 30 miles is disastrous for the environment compared other any AI use that's really possible at the moment.
Let's be cautious of AI but keep our critiques grounded in reality, so that we have enough powder left to fight the rest of things we need to change in society.
> "Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome."
Buying electricity isn't inherently destructive. That's a very bad analogy.
> These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.
I'm not arguing that they are efficient right now, but how would you measure that? What kind of output does it have to make per kWh of input to be acceptable? Keep in mind that the baseline of US power use is around 500GW and that currently AI is maybe 10.
How are you measuring efficiency? They're better than most humans, which is what I would need more of as a substitute.
A human consumes about 100 watts when not doing any physical exertion (round number, rule of thumb). So unless you can show an LLM running on 100w compute with capabilities similar to a human, they’re less efficient.
100 W is only the start. Let's say that I consume 100 W all along the day. I use an LLM for coding assistance in the old way of asking questions and copy pasting code. It's much faster than me at writing that code. I don't think it ever works 1 hour for me per day. It's probably 10 cumulative minutes, probably much less. Round it up to 12 minutes to make it 1/5 of a hour or round it down to 6 minutes for a 1/10. So instead of 24 it's 0.1 hours, 240 times less. Those 100 W could be 24000 W and the total power per day would be the same. Is that LLM consuming 24 kW when working for me? No idea but I hope it's less than that.
Of course I could do all of my coding alone again, but I would be slower. It's like walking to the mall several times per week, several hours per time, instead of once or twice per week with a car, three cumulative hours. I trade a higher energy consumption for more time to do other things and the ability to live far away from shops.
If you as a human are coding for 24 hours a day as the benchmark for LLM efficiency we have other problems.
I believe that we consume 100 W on average no matter what we do, except intense physical activities, which consume more.
Right, but you do stuff other than work 24 hours a day, right? You have fun, relax, etc.
Counting the 100w for 24 hours for a human doesn’t match up with counting the power usage from “AI” for only the 10 minutes it’s doing a task.
Also - units issue: 100 watts for a day is 2400 watt-hours. It’s a moot point anyway because the power draw for the frontier models is an order of magnitude off that the division by 24 is basically meaningless.
Are you against inefficiency or just LLMs? If it's the former, I assure you LLMs are nowhere near the top of the list lol
You should start from beef industry.
Every piece of progress looks like this to begin with.
The numbers must go up, there is no other way.
We've moved past asking where the energy comes from or how our planet will survive this critical phase.
These days, it's about framing - every country is scrambling to up their game just to stay in power. The companies that are riding this wave are spending millions in marketing, lobbying and billions on consuming energy so that they can make trillions in valuation.
I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.
> I am also an ardent user of AI - but sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens - because I know I am burning energy, and feeding part of this mission. If there is a solution, I would like to be a part of it.
This is by far the best article I've seen on it [0]. Which leads me to conclude: if you use coding agents, then yes, it's definitely a concern. Yet if you drive daily, even an EV, it's very small compared to that. Let alone flying. Personally, even if my "AI emissions" are at 10x his estimated usage (they almost certainly aren't), the other sacrifices I make to reduce emissions have such an impact that I'd still be multiple times below the national average.
Note how the above measures energy usage (kWh), not emissions. For anyone taking fossil fuel transit regularly, whether ICE car/taxi/airplane, AI usage is all but guaranteed to be meaningless compared to their transport emissions. One hamburger is at least 5x more emissions than his "median say with Claude Code", so there's another one. If you're feeling guilty, track how much beef you're eating, cut it down by 20% and use agents to your hearts content.
Now of course, a different form of AI usage like image generation and especially video generation is incomparably more energy-intensive per query. We'd need separate math on that.
[0] https://www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01-20-cc-impact/
It’s not clear from the article, but do these statistics taken into account the amount of electricity and water required to train the model in addition to inference?
For example, the article says their daily average use of Claude code is similar to the dishwasher running. Is that just including inference or also training Opus 4.5?
This is a great question. To my understanding the industry consensus is that for the big three providers, energy spend on inference had already surpassed training by summer last year, and the former's share only keeps increasing. The problem is that there's no hard data in public.
What we need to do here is write an article that makes a wild claim in either direction ("99% is inference!"), post it on HN, and wait for the comments to roll in that prove it right or wrong.
Indeed, it's all bullshit.
But it's the bullshit some people like so it's not going to go away soon.
> the other sacrifices I make
This frames the dilemma that you just need to make this little sacrifice so Trillion.ai can make it's trillion. We shouldn't sacrifice anything.
That applies the exact same way when talking about buying a new Revuelto from Lamborghini, or even a hamburger from McD's. There's nothing special about Trillion.ai's profit, nor its emissions, that make it any different. If I want to do either of those, and I don't want to feel guilty about it, then I need to make sacrifices elsewhere. A lot more sacrifices than if I spent a day using Trillion.ai to write some code, in truth.
The key word is "feel" which has a direct and causal relationship to societal programming which is directly impacted if not dictated by media/marketing _ both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using AND it's markup which is ostensibly used for marketing and the consumption guilt "feeling" feedback loop grows.
> both of which are heavily influenced by big players who encourage the consumer to feel guilty while paying both for the resource they are using
Hah, if only. Man, I wish that companies succeeded in doing that, then we'd have a lot more people making such sacrifices. That'd be great.
No one wants their customer to feel guilty because it makes them less likely to buy the product. It's the worst nightmare of any marketer.
I agree with your statement, but the difference is we all will pay higher electricity costs whether we use it or not. That's the difference between Mc.D's and AI.
Yet another example of socialize the costs, privatize the profits (except AI isn't profitable yet, lol)
But that too goes for the others all the same. We all pay with our health because some people fly with private jets, or drive Lambos, or indeed eat hamburgers every day. Our health being quite the more precious resource than our money.
But even on the subject of electricity costs. It looks like the biggest electricity consuming sector globally is.. the oil industry! So we're back to the Lambo drivers.
> sometimes I do feel guilty when I use so many tokens
There's nothing particularly worse about money spent on AI vs. anything else. I don't feel guilty for having 6 shirts even though I can only wear one at a time.
> how our planet will survive this critical phase.
> trillions in valuation.
This is more or less literally the "yes we destroyed the planet, but for a brief moment we created trillions in shareholder value" meme. Perhaps we need to take a step back and ask to what extent this benefits humans as humans, not as economic units. Especially given the explicit threat in the AI marketing material to destroy all creative industries and replace human fulfilment and even connection with AI.
We were told the "paperclip maximizer" as a cautionary tale. Instead, we constructed the "valuation maximizer".
There are people who recognize there is a problem and would support collective action to fix it, and there are those that don't. As long as you are in the first group, there's nothing else you can individually do to make a difference.
What if I was in the first group, but abandoned them after being lied to? Told how important it was for ME to take public transit and drive an EV, only for AI to march in and consume multiple nation's worth of energy. That's not "collective" , that's "rules for thee but not for me".
Well yeah, I agree, collective action would be actually collective. I'm not gonna try to prescribe something like taxes or infrastructure changes, but stuff like that.
You're just describing individual action, which like you said, isn't gonna do anything.
One of the potential upsides of AI in the USA is we'll bring down electrical prices compared to something like China. Power has to be abundantly plentiful and concentrated.
Maybe then, we could afford to smelt an ingot of aluminum in the USA.
Until then, I guess we're just sadly just burning coal to create cat memes. I hope Anthropic can lead the charge. Crypto was already a massive setback in terms of clean power, AI is already very dirty.
How will that happen? China is building more generation as we speak. And I mean a lot. The gap is widening and the rate of change is even worse, thanks to "clean beautiful coal" or whatever Trump said.
You are aware that China is building dozens of new coal power plants right? Just this year they have commissioned 50.[1] Granted, it's less than before, but still much more than other developed countries.
[1] https://abcnews.com/International/wireStory/china-building-c...
>but still much more than other developed countries.
China has also been installing more clean energy than the rest of the world combined, and their emissions might have peaked.
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=600,quality=10...
https://www.economist.com/china/2025/05/29/chinas-carbon-emi...
Yes, I am aware. They are increasing the energy output gap so much it's laughable, including coal. The MAGA administration isn't even building coal properly, but they are shuttering wind and solar. Wow, America! So much winning. China will catch up much sooner than anyone could believe thanks to GOP.
> they are shuttering wind and solar
Wind and solar combined generation increased by 12.2% during the first 11 months of 2025, providing 19% of total US electricity compared to 17.3% during the same period in 2024.
Between January and November 2025, utility-scale solar capacity grew by about 22,237 MW, while small-scale solar capacity increased by 5,461 MW. https://electrek.co/2026/01/28/eia-99-of-new-us-capacity-in-...
Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin? The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.
> Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin?
That's a reasonable assumption. At the same time, I don't know that you can neatly attribute things happening during one adminstration to the prior administration. We need more rigorous analysis than that. For instance, the economy tends to do better under Democratic than Republican rule, but using your lag mental model we should then actually ascribe it to Republic policy? Back to energy, notably, in Jul 2025, more coal was added than wind... should we ascribe that to the prior admin due to lag?
> The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.
Yes, that's clear. They are very hostile in rhetoric and action.
The administration characterizes wind and solar as expensive and unreliable energy sources that have been subsidized by taxpayers for too long. In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate subsidies for wind and solar in accordance with the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act". On his first day in office, Trump issued an order blocking the government from auctioning off the rights to build wind farms on public lands or in public waters. The administration has halted already-issued permits for offshore wind projects and suspended leases for five major wind projects in December. Solar and wind projects are now subject to an elevated review process likely to slow down approval. Tax credits for renewable energy projects were restricted, requiring projects to begin construction within a year or produce electricity by 2028.
The adminstration prefers fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal), hydropower, nuclear energy, and critical minerals as domestic energy resources.
Despite all that, 2026 is still projected to have 99%+ new capacity in 2026 to be solar, wind, and storage.
Congress provided $320 million for DOE solar and wind programs despite the White House requesting zero funding for these programs. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-gas-nuclear-ferc-infr...
So I, for one, have hope.
Yeah, absolutely no way to bring down power prices when compared to China. They installed over 400 GW (peak) of new renewable capacity in 2025 and show no signs of intending to stop.
But still, it's possible that a smaller, dirtier build-out in the US will significantly drop prices relative to today, and certainly relative to the rest of the world (which is failing spectacularly at building out power infrastructure).
But yes, the only way you're ever going to smelt Aluminum in the US again is if you have customers who can't/won't buy Chinese Aluminum. And even then, worth keeping an eye on the richer Arabs states. They're quickly roofing over their deserts, and certainly don't worry about local NIMBY opposition to power lines...
Rather have the government tax these entities (great way to have the public support a VAT in this instance) than rely on their "benefactors" that have shown zero remorse in the societal destruction against the planet and humanity, but okay.
Utilities do charge infrastructure projects for their interconnection costs. Maybe there was some hypothetical situation where some costs would have gone into a general budget, but utilities aren’t usually in the habit of doing large interconnection projects for free and sending the bills to consumers.
So the interconnect costs cover the infrastructure buildout to generate the additional power demands, or that’s spread across all consumers in perpetuity? Because the interconnect itself is the cheap part afaik. And all of our rates go up to cover the costs of the additional generation whether it’s another solar farm or another ng plant.
They don’t generally just have GW of power sitting idle for a rainy day (I’m not talking about the capacity they reserve for hot july days).
Most of the increase seen in utility costs is for transmission, not generation. Generation is an important piece, but it's not the only piece.
Electricity price is a weird beast. Everyone has to pay the price of the most expensive electricity source (generally gas plants) that was recruited to respond to the power demand. It means that during a spike the electricity price can double or triple.
What I infer from Anthropic post is that they will estimate the energy price as if they weren't using it and pay the difference if their use upped the price.
Gas plants are only the most expensive in the simple cycle configuration. Combined cycle plants are competitive with other forms of baseload generation. The trouble is the response time.
With day ahead forecasting, we can try to turn that peak load into base load. Grid operations are a non trivial part in how this AI energy situation plays out.
Batteries are an even bigger deal. You can completely stop building single stage peaker gas turbines when it gets economical to just drop a 2GW / 1 GWh battery pack next to every gas plant. When demand spikes, you just discharge the battery while you heat soak the steam turbine and the drum to prepare it for increased load.
We’re too busy cranking out disposable e-cig cartridge batteries with our limited battery capacity. It’s like we know what’s right but just can’t seem to do it.
disposable e-cig cartridge batteries are a disgrace and should be illegal, but that's not hindering grid scale battery build out.
First of all, the resources those tiny batteries use are less than a drop in the bucket of what we ideally would like to add to the grid, and secondly, we're currently nowhere close to being limited by battery capacity. China alone had the industrial capacity to produce more than 2 TWh of new batteries last year, but they actually produced a bit less than 1 TWh because there was no market demand for this many batteries.
They just overbuilt production capacity by over 100%, per their industrial policy.
That's for the spot price. If you have bought futures then that won't impact you
Shouldn't future contract sellers be smart enough to take these aspects in account? So you might not pay the spot price. But overall you will cover it. As those selling futures are there to make money. So they charge more than they pay for the power.
pay the difference only over their energy consumption, or pay the difference for the whole group?
Wow, good job in doing the bare minimum?
"We will cover the cost of upgrading the electricity grid so we can use more energy" yeah. Of course you will. What?
Surprised local power generation isn’t in the radar. Whether it’s solar, natural gas or others.
I see this as another OPEX expenditure that has to be factored into Anthropic’s (hypothetical) profitability, and am intrigued as to what this means in an industry that is becoming rife with CAPEX sinks…
When they say "we" they're opposing this to "US ratepayers", not "our customers". Likely that this will appear on your Anthropic bill.
Not a word about sustainable sources of energy or the long-term viability of this massive energy suck.
This is all good and well wishes as long as investors are willing to pour money into the bubble. When the music stops is where we will see the true colors. Corporations are optimized to make money, governments should be optimized to protect people.
Please do hang your datacenters in space so as not to piss away your waste heat in our rivers, soils or atmosphere.
Go to the bathroom upstairs, don't use our ecosystem as your latrines if you can direct it straight to the CMB.
The US consumes 100 million aluminum soda cans per day.
We lived without aluminum soda cans for 100k years
You can't compare soda cans with computational results, we can't teleport soda cans up and down cheaply, but we can cheaply beam data up and down.
Yes I can, on utilitarian grounds. We do it all the time, sending data centers to space is not zero cost externality.
Please continue:
1. humans use soda cans, that people could do without for 100k years
2. ???
3. Don't put datacenters into space?
"aluminium smelting uses a lot of electricity we should do that"
"data centers use a lot of electricity we shouldn't do that"
"why?"
"computers are different"
for the simple reason that other energy consuming industries have physical products in and physical products out, which is costly to transport from space, while uploading extra corpus tokens and downloading new weights is essentially free from space (compared to the hardware shipping costs).
people have been correctly indoctrinated about global warming and the dominant heating terms coming from excess CO2 concentration, but because of this over-emphasis they neglect the prompt heating that comes with nearly all energy generation mechanisms (from fossil fuels, to solar panels to nuclear energy).
when the whole world starts raising their living conditions, and when a computational race erupts, there is no taming of total human energy consumption.
but what we can do is offload the bulk of computational energy consumption, like training common goods such as LLM weights...
I wish HN would have a downvote penalty mechanism, where the number of replies on comments you downvote should be at least x percent, say 50%.
Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.
Maybe because your tone is needlessly aggressive and lot's of people don't want HN turns into Reddit/Twitter. There is enough people raging on everything on all social networks maybe we are here hopping to have more civilised discussions.
Or maybe because people don't know basic physics principles, and dislike "reality based communities" from forming in their midst?
Let me explain to you that I downvoted this comment because you complained about your downvotes.
Please don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.
look at the timestamps, when I wrote that comment there was no discussion at all, only the downvote and my request for discussion... which worked
but now you say I "interrupted" the back-then-non-existent discussion... whatever rsync, whatever...
> Oh no the burden of actually explaining why you want to de-emphasize a comment.
One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.
Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.
>One single square meter of land in direct sunlight receives a constant 6kW (21MJ) of energy. The heat rejected by industrial and other processes is absolutely minuscule in comparison, a rounding error.
This is incorrect, at ground level its about 1 kW of sunlight per square meter if that square meter is orthogonal to the line of sight to the sun, otherwise it gets diminished with cos(theta) where theta is the angle between the line of sight to the sun and the normal of the square meter of land, it can not receive 6 kW no matter the orientation. And 6 kW is a power, while 21 MJ is an energy.
> Comments that are incorrect but posted in an authoritative voice get downvoted, for good reason.
Indeed your incorrect comment in an authoritative voice might get downvoted, for good reason, but I won't be the one doing it...
Welp, turns out I should verify information better. I thought 6kW seemed high when a 1 square meter solar panel that is ~25% efficient can generate 250W of electricity. My apologies.
Only train when the Sun shines.
I keep saying it, we need to ditch all the "old" styles of power generation YES ncluding green ones like Solar etc. We should all be pushing for SMRs!!!
> projects will create hundreds of permanent jobs
See, the AI is gonna create jobs, not eliminate them lol. Now let us strip mine your hood G.
Blah, blah, blah. prices will rise regardless and they know it
If you're going to ruin the climate and prices for all kinds of stuff, the least you can do is bring your own nuclear power plant.
> Cover grid infrastructure costs. We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through increases to our monthly electricity charges.
How does paying more monthly cover an infrastructure build out that requires up front capital?
Financing.
shrug as long as the cost of getting that upfront capital is also added to what they pay...