>>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.
These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending.
xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
> xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
80ish% in the US live <100 miles from their hometown.
It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."
Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of people.
So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As long as human biology exists humans will solve for those problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes, ethno objects that come and go with the generations.
Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to the living.
Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.
The alternative to multiple jurisdictions racing to the bottom is strong centralized control to prevent anyone from racing to the bottom. That will be an even worse pill than datacenter pollution to swallow for Americans. Only the big cities are big enough to resist the race.
Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.
Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but the flip side of that argument is that whenever you do see higher investment and better amenities in a historically marginalized neighborhood, that gets loudly deplored by faux-progressive activists as harmful "gentrification" and "changing the character" of the neighborhood. Y'all should pick one stance or the other; you can't have it both ways!
So the thing about "Ya'll should ..." is that it's often mistaking "Group A and Group B hold conflicting beliefs but share a characteristic" with "Group C, all the people with this characteristic, all exhibit an incoherent belief structure".
For example suppose you apply this to the US Senate. So instead of Group A (Democrats and a those who caucus with them) and Group B (Republicans) we instead think there's a single Group C, Senators. Now their behaviour seems incoherent, this Group C seems to hold contradictory opinions and behaves irrationally, why can't they get their act together? The actual answer is that we misunderstood and they're not a single coherent group so that's why they don't act that way.
You might as well argue: "Part of my brain thought A at time Y. A different part of my brain had a different thought B, at a different time Z. Why the accusations of hypocrisy?"
The problem arises when an individual or group tries to represent themselves as more credible/consistent/coherent than they really are.
If you freely admit that you have multiple personality disorder, hypocrisy is to be expected from you as an individual. People know what they're in for.
If you respond to accusations of hypocrisy by saying: "Hm, that's a good point. I'll have to reflect and see if I can reach consistency here." Then people recognize you are making a good-faith effort.
I've observed that modern progressivism represents itself with a strong us/them boundary. The vociferousness of the rhetoric vastly outstrips the quality of the underlying reasoning/decision mechanism. And I've never seen a progressive say: "You make a good point, we'll have to debate on that."
You are correct that individual progressives may, in principle, be credible if they have a coherent philosophy which is consistently applied (including to critique their own "team" when appropriate).
But empirically, modern progressivism is more of a "meme ideology" where precepts are invoked when convenient, against whatever outgroup is currently fashionable. Progressive rhetoric, and progressive reasoning, is so flexible and untethered that if you're sufficiently talented at wielding it, it can be used to reach virtually any conclusion. The selective application of principles at the group level has strong parallels to how hypocrisy works at the level of an individual.
A movement can be meaningfully described as hypocritical, even if its individual members are not.
> I've never seen a progressive say: "You make a good point, we'll have to debate on that."
Humans are bad at that, and the ones who say it often don’t actually mean it. Some people claim their openness to debate, but that’s not the same as being open to changing one’s mind.
There are dozens of cases like this. E.g. if you say white people are too powerful, that's enlightened. If you say Jews are too powerful, that's antisemitic. Double standards are the rule. Consistent, impartial application of principles is a very rare thing with this ideology.
And frankly, you characterization of those views makes clear you're not interested in actual answers.
The primary issue with gentrification in historically black neighborhoods is that owners face the dilemma of having to leave their community to capture the increased property values.
For example, I live near the oldest black church in the PNW. Many of the older congregation members live in the area, and have low mobility. If we don't build a mix of housing that addresses their needs in downsizing, they end up having to effectively exile themselves from the community they've lived within for decades. They can't simply "move somewhere lower cost" without dramatic changes to their entire social world, just at an age where keeping those social ties takes a lot of effort.
I actually agree that building smaller/denser housing would be great and address the needs of many existing residents, but those same faux-progressive activists will decry that in the strongest terms, and insist that any increases in density will only further even worse gentrification and change the historical "flavor" of the neighborhood in extremely detrimental ways. Again, progressive activists cannot have it both ways; they should pick one or the other.
That's a misreading of the term in the same way saying that the phrase 'black lives matter' imply white lives don't matter
The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.
If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient
What's uncomfortable is not the racism claim, but that the argument is merely a conjecture. It's lazy and dishonest. More importantly, this line of argument tends to shut down intelligent conversation, which this forum is about.
It makes more sense to word it like this when you take into consideration historical trends, like drowned towns for lakes or dams, highway system along redline, thriving neighbourhoods erased to create parks… often preceded by violence and little to no compensation.
My interpretation is it would be less likely to happen near a wealthy neighborhood compared to a poor neighborhood. Why talk about race if its not about race?
Please read the article I linked in another reply to you.
My neighborhood was prosperous when it was systematically stolen from the black people who built it. They literally razed a thriving business district. And then the land sat empty for decades, only in the end to be sold to property developers.
They used eminent domain to steal people's homes and businesses in a way that was blatantly criminal, but the victims had no recourse given the courts and entire rest of the political structure was complicit in the actions.
And variations of this story played out everywhere across America.
So yes, the fact that a neighborhood is historically black is relevant, because it shows the events of today are part of a continued arc of injustice.
The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.
The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.
Crime rates also statistically correlate with demographics, but if I assume a specific person is a criminal based on that stat, I would (rightly) be called racist.
Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor' similarly feels racist.
"Historically black" is a euphemism -- that's a term that makes people feel better about something awful -- which refers to the fact that for the majority of the last three hundred years people have been systematically, governmentally, socially and personally discriminated against because of the color of their skin, and that racism led to massive inequity reflected in wealth, income, education and standards of living.
The facts of history show this. It is not a subtle statistical effect.
People who argue the way that you have been are either woefully ignorant of this matter or are playing games trying to justify the status quo, or are just racist trolls. This isn't a FAQ on HN because it's a FAQ in real life.
> Crime rates also statistically correlate with demographics, but if I assume a specific person is a criminal based on that stat, I would (rightly) be called racist.
Who said anything about a specific person? They are talking about a neighborhood, in a urban area in a region known for the endemic poverty in black-majority areas due to the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.
As a wise character once said, "poverty is a condition, not a crime".
> > Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor' similarly feels racist.
There are a few historically black communities in the US that are middle-class and prosperous, and Black Americans have made huge advances, but to this day, concentrations of Black American community prosperity tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
The question is how you check, qualify and--last but not least--apply the statistical findings. Are we trying to lift disadvantaged communities by providing extra resources and help people get on a better footing in life, or harassing individuals on the street because they have a certain skin color? I'm very eager to support the former and protest the latter.
I don't know, what are we doing with these assumptions? Are we trying to lift disadvantaged communities by providing extra resources and help people get on a better footing in life, or harassing individuals on the street because they have a certain skin color? I'm very eager to support the former and protest the latter.
You've got an extra actor in the mix that makes for a different argument and actually supports the idea that it's racist, I think.
Namely - I think most agree that it's racist to mindlessly assume race and poverty are correlated. The argument here is that the AI companies made that assumption - in other words, they're being called racists.
I don't think it's racist to speculate that a corporation, that made choices that specifically impact black neighborhoods, is racist.
It's because it's part of a more general pattern where bad things like this are preferentially done to black people. It's the same with highway locations. For some reason, when choosing where to demolish to build a highway, they prefer to demolish neighbourhoods with mostly black people.
These "gas turbines" are located next door to the Allen Combined Cycle Plant, a grid scale natural gas power plant with 1.1GW capacity. It's there to power a nearby steel mill. That's the kind of neighborhood xAI has put its cluster in.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment, and "environmental racism" just reeks of the usual agenda pushing.
Once, when I was a child, I remember the carefully engineered smoke stacks in Sudbury Ontario spilling out acrid smoke sideways, and then straight down into the town.
No theyre saying that since that day everyone has given up and nothing matters anymore. We all collectively decided that it is OKAY and didnt change a single thing since.
For my part I am prepared to accept that XAI might attempt to flout regulations. If I knew more about their operating practices I might even expect it. Even in that case I would not expect it to be the case that you could assume that they had done in any individual case.
While this isn't criminal law, the principle that underlies innocent until proven guilty still applies. I don't think it's acceptable do condemn people because you are assuming that they are doing the kind of thing you expect them to do. I think it is still incumbent upon accusers to make their case and for that accusation to be robustly challenged. Not just by people who stand something to gain by one outcome over another, but by people who want to find out the truth.
I tend to challenge ideas that support my viewpoint more than oppose, I find it incredibly irritating to encounter a flawed argument concluding something I agree with. Somewhat annoyingly it seems to cause people to assume I believe the opposite to what I actually believe, because there seems to be a presumption that you should accept all arguments in favour of your viewpoint no matter how bad they are. Apparently I'm not the right sort of team player.
>by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.
I don't see how you could in good faith reach that conclusion from reading the comment above. It seems to me to be talking about the agenda of people expressing concern for others. That's the "Think of the children" kind of argument. Invoking disadvantaged groups in this manner very rarely expresses the agenda of the groups in question, it is usually made by people claiming that there own agenda is in the interests of the group indicated, frequently without input from that group. I don't know it that is an accurate claim to make in this instance or not, but it is certainly not characterising having the ability to breath as an agenda.
I did not invoke agenda pushing. I referred to the use of the term in the conversation above.
If anything my agenda here is to suggest to people that they should not imagine the opinions that exist in other people's minds and to respond to what they say and do.
If you must know my political leaning, It would be a non-relativistic form of far left. By non-relativistic I mean based upon a principle that is fixed cannot change. That principle is compassion. To some this makes me right wing because I reject demonisation of the wealthy, I defend radicalised people from abuse, I criticize the use of violent imagery like the guillotine by people who consider themselves Left wing. In simple political compass terms I am a left liberal. I don't feel that captures the sentiment exactly.
George Orwell once reflected on the term fascist, since due to his writing he was often called upon as an arbitor to categorize instances. Essentially concluding that the term had largely lost meaning due to people applying it to whatever they didn't like. He is often quoted with the same complaint that people have to this day. However most quotes do not place it fully in context. He wrote: "...almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come". I think there is a critical point here. My left wing principle of compassion goes against the principles of many self identifying left wing people of bullying those who's opinions they disagree with. That's not a progressive stance, it is taking the ground newly won by progressives as the new normal. In time they will come to fight the progressives as they remain stationary and the progressives, ...well, progress
“I reject demonisation of the wealthy” is quite an odd thing for someone identifying as “far left” to say. But then you go on to identify as a “left liberal” - canonically not considered far left - so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
Whether it’s worth demonizing anyone or not, we can condemn actions that hurt innocent people and we can maintain skepticism of the ultra-wealthy and their motives without “bullying”. It does sound like your principle of compassion extends a little too much towards capital and not enough towards labor.
Therein lies the rub, when people are surprised to see a left wing person criticising the idea of othering, you have to wonder what principles they have left to call left wing.
>we can condemn actions that hurt innocent people and we can maintain skepticism of the ultra-wealthy and their motives without “bullying”.
Indeed and I do condemn actions. What I don't do is conddemn people.
I am for robust regulation, free expression, free movement, worker rights,
Limiting wealth inequality, free fundimental services of health educatiion. I want more police but with fewer powers. I support harm minimalization over punishing drug users, I favour rehabilitation in prison over training recidivists, I am against hate in all its forms. My most extreme views would be that advertising is inherently harmful to society, and teaching any religion as true to someone under the age of consent is child abuse.
All of these come from the principle that I think all people have feelings,worthless and rights, they deserve the best we can provide for them. If they disagree with you the first step is trying to understand their point of view.
To me, imposing your will on others, dismissing people for thinking the wrong thing, shunning them for saying the wrong thing or associating with 5he wrong people, these are all properties that stand at the other end of the spectrum to me. I don't particularly care what label you put on the ideology over there, but whatever it is, those are the attributes that have caused some of the darkest moments in h7man history.
Sure, I agree. Kneejerk condemnation and othering is bad.
But there’s a need to balance even-handedness with a healthy skepticism of those in power. Otherwise you risk becoming an apologist. No one is saying not to do your homework or not to think critically, but we’re also saying not to come in guns blazing in defense of moneyed interests. That’s what the person who brought up the hidden agenda stuff seemed to be doing - making assumptions that favor capital without even taking the time to read the article that addressed those assumptions. That’s not even-handed, it’s biased against labor.
Consider the original post I responded to. It asked two questions.
>are you skeptical xai would wiggle around regulations and pollute a city?
But they were responding to I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment which makes no claim as to whether they might obey or disobey regulations, the words "putting a dent" in the local envionnent*
The data from the article does not sufficiently address this, it uses satellite data and a short time frame. Without specifying the resolution of their data (which could be kilometer sized pixels) their claims about locality is in doubt. In short term measures, trends are harder to spot, a rise over months could just mean it is less windy in the nollowing season. Without a ground level meadurement of the air quality and a evaluation of the total local emission from all sources, you cannot hope to measure the health impact of a single cause.
None of that says that they are not polluting. What it says is that this is not evidence of it. Someone expressed skepticism based on the proportional emission of one of many of their ability to move the dial, and was challenged based upon the likelihood of what they might do. Claiming skeptasism that a thief could rob Fort Knox, is not a claim that the thief is honest
>by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air?
I simply cannot believe that this is a reasonable interpretation of what they said.
That's the thing that motivated me to post on this thread. That the first post I responded to here was attacking the player, not the ball.
I continue to post replies here out of my own sense of duty to fully explain my position to promote understanding, I'm not trying to win anything here, I only want people to see a honestly held perspective.
What "flawed argument" ? All facts and evidence have been provided - the measured nitrogen dioxide increase of ~80% will harm the respiratory system. Folks who cause harm should be punished not excused.
I am not referring to any particular argument here, I mentioned it to place in context one of my motivations to challenging ideas is to seek the truth, not to prove my point of view correct.
It was bought up here because it seemed like the post I was replying to was contesting the reasons for making a point rather than the point it was making.
>Folks who cause harm should be punished not excused.
In this instance I think the issue is not think that was suggested otherwise. The issue was more of Are the claims true, Does it have the impact stated, and who caused them.
Personally I do not want those who cause harm to be punished. I want them to not cause harm. Seeking vengeance on harm already done is unlikely to lead to an understanding of why their actions were harmful. It motivates them to not get caught in future, I would much rather they not want to harm.
Here are some quotes from an article [1] that directly addresses your point:
> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.
> The turbines are only temporary and don’t require federal permits for their emissions of NOx and other hazardous air pollutants like formaldehyde, xAI’s environmental consultant, Shannon Lynn, said during a webinar hosted by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The argument appears to rely on a loophole in federal regulations that environmental groups and former EPA officials say shouldn’t apply to the situation.
> Mayo and Lynn didn’t respond to calls and texts from POLITICO’s E&E News requesting comment and have not said publicly how much longer the “temporary” turbines will remain onsite. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
As you can see, xAI is being deliberately deceptive here and this has been known, but unaddressed for a while now. Remember that we are talking about a grave threat to the health and life of the entire population of a town. That too in a country where healthcare is deliberately unaffordable to ordinary folks. I don't know if you know how nasty formaldehyde and NOx smells.
How do you so casually trivialize and vilify such concerns as 'agenda pushing'? It's very sad that HN has too many apologists for these greedy serial violators and abusers. At the same time, the sheer lack of empathy towards the unprivileged is appalling! They're humans too!
You're not very off the the mark. To add in that extra detail, xAI is using portable gas turbines that are meant for providing emergency backup power in case of a catastrophic loss of power, like in the event of a natural disaster. Being portable, they lack the systems necessary to avoid polluting the surrounding air with oxides of nitrogen and formaldehyde - really nasty stuff. That shouldn't normally cause a serious issue, since the turbines are meant for temporary backup alone. But at Memphis, xAI is stretching the meaning of 'temporary'.
This stance strikes me as questionable, to use the first hunch that comes to mind to seed doubt in a topic that is researched and reported by multiple fairly reputable sources and multiple people on the ground.
Polluting the environment in any form is a violation of property rights. It’s unfortunate our government hasn’t codified that reality.
My neighbor’s don’t have a right to pollute my property by shining a bright light on it or blowing smoke into it or dumping chemicals into my underground well. Even if it’s mostly legal, it’s still a violation of my underlying right to property
Just because one corp does something x bad, it means some other corp is ok to do something 10x bad?
There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.
I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.
My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).
Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.
Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.
Lower efficiency gas furnaces don’t have a completely sealed exhaust and rely on a draft for pollutant evacuation. This usually works good enough when properly installed and maintained but can be a source of indoor air pollution. Although typically minimal.
And there are also decorative and/or supplemental gas heating devices which exhaust into the home.
>I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.
it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.
What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.
Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time, which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.
You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.
They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions can be very low if done correctly.
Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was there for what, a decade already? Before it, there was a coal power plant there too.
Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.
I just looked, and you're right. It's in an industrial area several km from homes, and near existing NG facilities, including one where they flare gas.
I don't doubt that it is a source of pollution, but I agree that this is overblown in the same was as the claims that datacentres are using up all the fresh water.
Probably not because if it affected white neighborhoods, it either wouldn't be enacted, shut down after complaints, or receive enough bad press as to be shut down.
Because the people who decided where to locate it and the people in government who could do something to stop it make decisions about how much they care based on those folks’ skin color. If those generators were placed near a rich white neighborhood, the government response would be wildly different.
Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.
And TFA addresses this. South Memphis was a community largely composed of freed slaves, where manufacturers set up shop, the military dumped waste (now a superfund site), and people have continued to mark the area for polluting industries for generations.
TFA said it's all legal and explicit federal policy. You don't have to like it, but some people are going to have to make minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services. Look on the bright side, when these people all have personal robot doctors caring for them well into their 100s they will be grateful they didn't listen to the NIMBYs
I honestly cannot tell if this is satire. Literally a Lord Farquaad level take. Some of you may get asthma and lung cancer, but that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make to ensure we can deliver MechaHitler to the masses.
It’s cute they describe this as a solution to _the_ power problem. It’s a solution to _their_ power problem. We have a grid problem. This massive amount of investment would be an incredible time to do something about it. Instead we’ve got an administration hostile to modern energy solutions and an industry hostile to everyone. Really depressing to see all this money go up in smoke in such a massive short sighted rush.
I previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side.
My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.
I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.
Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.
On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.
As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
so we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end - residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago). That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration wave.
Kinda proving that these are a bad deal for communities - very few jobs and tax revenues, but enjoy the increased asthma and cancer we all get to pay for.
Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W.
So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
Is it though? When I ask an LLM research questions, it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.
Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.
Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.
If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for the same amount of work.
Training energy is amortized across the lifespan of a model. For any given query for the most popular commercial models, your share of the energy used to train it is a small fraction of the energy used for inference (e.g. 10%).
For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant. This is apart from the fact that right now we are at a choke point where it's much more important to generate less CO2 than it is to write scientific simulation code a little quicker (and most people are using AI for much more unnecessary stuff like marketing)
> For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant.
That is certainly not a logical leap I'm making. AI doesn't make anybody redundant, the same way mechanized farming didn't. It just frees them up to do more productive things.
Now consider whether LLM's will ultimately speed up the technological advancements necessary to reduce CO2? It's certainly plausible.
Think about how much cloud computing and open sourced changed it so you could launch a startup with 3 engineers instead of 20. What happened? An explosion of startups, since there were so many more engineers to go around. The engineers weren't delivering pizzas instead.
Same thing is happening with anything that needs more art -- the potential for video games here is extraordinary. A trained artist is way more effective leveraging AI and handling 10x the output, as the tools mature. Now you get 10x more video games, or 10x more complex/larger worlds, or whatever it is that the market ends up wanting.
Except reality is they're not. If you want to argue the contrary, show the statistics that unemployment among digital artists is rising.
So many people make this mistake when new technologies come out, thinking they'll replace workers. They just make workers more productive. Sometimes people do end up shifting to different fields, but there's so much commercial demand for art assets in so many things, the labor market shrinking is not the case for digital artists right now.
How so? A human needs the entire civilisation to be productive at that level. If you take a just the entire US electricity consumption and divide it by its population, you'll get a result that's an order of magnitude higher. And that's just electricity. And that's just domestic consumption, even though US Americans consume tons of foreign-made goods.
Ah! And don't get me started about how specific its energy source must be! Pure electricity, no less! Where a human brain comes attached with an engine that can power it for days on a mere ham sandwich!
I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15 seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to type.
Speed highly correlates with power efficiency. I believe my hardware maxes out somewhere around 150W. 15 seconds of that isn't much at all.
> Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in general anything that serves millions of requests in a small footprint is going to look pretty big.
It's not a good analogy at all, because of what they said about mundane hardware. They're specifically not talking about any kind of ridiculous wattage situation, they're talking about single GPUs that need fewer watts than a human in an office to make text faster than a human, or that need 2-10x the watts to make video a thousand times faster.
An LLM gives AN answer. If you ask for not many more than that it gets confused, but instead of acting in a human-like way, it confidently proceeds forward with incorrect answers. You never quite know when the context got poisoned, but reliability drops to 0.
There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...
The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).
Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously.
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
And then we get this gem...
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.
Does anyone know a really good source for basic information estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong reactions that tend to cloud the facts.
Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?
US grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find.
So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.
For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).
Thanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing.
1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)
Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.
What about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?
How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days.
Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by power, by all means, offer users a discount when their queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to save cents to fill up their tanks - you can’t say there isn’t precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better question is, is it really a constraint?
Doesnt really work, as the biggest cost is buying GPUs etc which has to be paid for, and leaving them idle when the sun isnt shining doesnt pay the purchase costs. Their are industries where this does work though.
You both are talking about this stuff as if it is a new concept. Demand-based pricing is already commonplace for both electricity and compute.
The demand for both compute and electricity is higher while people are awake and using them. But not all demand is realtime, and some will shift in response to prices.
haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually quite flexible
Reciprocating natural gas engines can be moved from [concrete] pad to pad and be up and running in under 24 hours. The portable turbines take longer but they’re still fast.
Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.
The density required for solar is also much lower - the coordination between different land parcels and routing power and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem gas turbines.
Takes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front investment, and requires a lot more land.
The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
More like it’s a really long way to say the government has utterly failed at making sure electricity generation and transmission capacity keeps up with demand so datacenters have been forced to get creative with alternative ways to power themselves. These companies absolutely want to use renewable energy from the power grid but the government blew it.
> This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."
Like every other industry in the world?
I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.
The difference is they are new. It’s not rational but people on the whole generally are ok with the status quo of how the sausage is made largely because they don’t really think about it. But new systems being spun up provide an entry point for a discussion. Ideally that discussion can then be widened and open up an opportunity for wider scale change. Or nothing happens and it all becomes the new status quo which most don’t think about again.
The difference is that the food industry at least feeds me and a house provides me shelter. The people in charge of building AI data centers intend to replace all labor in using my own and leave me begging for peanuts, while also making energy and many goods more expensive and ruining the environment
The problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not going to be flexible enough to take new demand.
It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.
I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
Why is no one talking about the "other grid" capacity here?
Natural gas at this scale cannot be delivered by truck. It's piped in direct from fields, typically.
When do we run out of natural gas "grid" capacity in these locations? I can't imagine we're that overbuilt compared to the electrical grid itself?
The big freeze in Texas is a recent example of the natural gas grid having localized "brownouts" due to a few factors - one of which being the demand of all the natural gas peakers trying to fire at once.
Seems like this is the next infrastructure piece to have a supply crunch to me? There are places (North Dakota) so contranstrained by capacity to deliver gas to the "grid" that they simply flare it off because it's cheaper to pay the government to do that vs. lay pipe. This implies to me that natural gas is about to become more valuable.
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.
I mean, the claim is certainly nonsensical in the sense that this isn't something Wärtsilä just "realized". They have been in the power plant business for decades. In the oldest financials they have online (the annual report for year 2000) their power plant sales are larger than their marine engine sales.
Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists.
But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?
I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative.
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.
> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!
The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.
Here's my guess: there are lots of datacenters being built in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois [1]. Also in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Utah.
I think the first 5 states have this in common: there are lots of coal burning power plants that were shut down, but can be restarted and hooked to the grid on a relatively short notice. The grid is also quite good in this region.
In Texas, it is likely that new power can be generated with a combination of solar, wind, gas, and fast permitting.
I don't have an explanation for Georgia.
For Arizona, and perhaps Nevada and Utah too, I think it is likely to be solar.
Don't know about the others, but Illinois permanently shut down (and demolished or repurposed the land) the majority of its coal power plants over the past couple decades.
Illinois gets about half its power from nuclear (we have 6 plants and 11 reactors), followed by natural gas at around 20%, and then about equal amounts of coal and wind, at around 10-15%.
So Illinois is actually a pretty decent place to build datacenters, from a clean power generation perspective.
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive. xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.
Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything else.
I'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles - their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as they see it.
The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
"Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but rather sociopathic.
And all without the proper permits! Using 35 generators when they were only allowed 15! Yay! So glad we're allowing AI companies to break law after law after law to not be able to reason logically the basic Towers of Hanoi.
There's not a single mention of pollution or clean energy or the environment in the entire article. Presumably the regulatory requirements for these generators are less stringent than for proper power plants, so the costs are pushed onto the rest of society (having to deal with the environmental impact) while Microsoft et al. keep the profits?
Boom’s pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers wasn’t surprising when data center deployments started using turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking point.
What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
> What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”
Boom doesn’t actually have a turbine yet. Their design partner publicly pulled out of their contract with Boom a while ago.
Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It’s one of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever they’re doing in public is just PR right now. Until they actually produce something (other than a prototype that doesn’t resemble their production goals using other people’s parts) their PR releases don’t mean a whole lot.
Cool article. It's pretty weird that the writer seems to attribute all decisions by xAI to Mr. Musk personally. I doubt he is closely involved in such technical projects.
I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.
What makes you think that the entire process isn't being made more efficient? There are entire papers dedicated to pulling out more FLOPs from GPUs so that less energy is being wasted on simply moving memory around. Of course, there's also inference side optimizations like speculative decoding and MoE. Some of these make the training process more expensive.
The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.
> However, AI infrastructure cannot wait for the grid’s multiyear transmission upgrades. An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Getting a 400 MW datacenter online even six months earlier is worth billions. Economic need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid. The industry is already searching for new solutions.
wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with that.
This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
Battery capacity is still better at short duration shifting- milliseconds, minutes- all night is tough. The xAI mega pack can only do 4 hours according to the article.
This is coming from a group that does analysis on the semiconductor and cloud industries and provided very expensive access to their models and info. They are the citation.
So I guess it’s not a bubble then since these companies are raking in the big revenues? Or maybe they are counting all those circular investments as revenues somehow?
Fair enough, but it has been stated over and over that OpenAI's (as well as others) plan for profit is subscriptions. If their revenue predictions are based on that, then like others have said, it is mathematically impossible.
Have you considered that the industry analysis might be a biased source since they are all in on a economic model that must grow at all costs or it collapses? Do you trust McKinsey consulting because they give industry analysis? Blind trust in these corporate entities is how we get Enron, WorldCom, and an opioid crisis.
But hey, I'm just some asshole on the internet. Carry on.
Even if that’s true, that seems like a putrid number, no?
Assuming a single 1GW the data center runs 24/7 365, it’s consuming 8.76 TwH per year. Only being able to generate $10-$12B in revenue (not profit) per year while consuming as much electricity as the entire state of Hawaii (1.5M people) seems awful.
If you do the math, that's $10-$12 per watt year. There's approx 24×365.25=8766 hours in a year, so assuming that the datacenters would be running 24×7, that boils down to $1.14 to $1.37 in revenue per kWh. That's not a bad deal if power really is a major part of the expense.
As far as I can tell, power isn't actually a major part of the expense, it's dwarfed by the capex. Just the amortization on the GPU will be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the power to run the GPU at 100%. (Assuming a 5 year depreciation period.)
Yeah I guess I'm not the target audience for this because I assumed that "the power problem" was "massive increase in electricity costs for people despite virtually unchanged usage on their part", not "AI companies have to wait too long to be able to start using even more power than they already are":
> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.
> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”
I understand the instinct but if people seriously think that they are solving any problem by unplugging cell phone chargers, they are simply bad at math. Human time is easily worth more than that, even when working at minimum wage.
That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I have not done the math.
They are not necessarily bad at math, but they probably aren't electricians or EEs or have ever needed or been asked to calculate how much power a cell phone charger uses.
Mom/Dad used to unplug things and turn lights off, so they do too.
I think it's also just how people start acting in situations where they can't control anything that would make a difference. In the presence of an issue you can't solve, if you can do something, even if it's small and won't really help, sometimes it feels good to at least do that. Being able to address the anxiety even a little a bit still might be worthwhile.
And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors.
This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.
I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.
> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai
Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.
If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.
What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office; maybe the workload just shrank a bit; maybe they’re worried about the economic outlook for next year…
Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use AI at all. Maybe they were more efficient before AI but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?
Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people and AI that would take other companies 8-25 people. A brand new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it or contracting with company B. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Whose job(s)?
> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai.
Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.
It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical fuckups of the government
In the case of Grok's turbines, no emissions controls means sick people. Plus all the CO2 pushing climate collapse faster which hurts every coming generation.
Gas plants are not bad… but imagine 400 MW of gas plants in a concentrated area. You’ll always have NOx and SOx by products whenever you’re burning gas.
Gas is certainly less of a problem than coal, but they still produce plenty of bad stuff: nitrogen oxides and bad VOCs like formaldehyde that are well studied to increase risk of asthma and some types of cancer. I certainly wouldn’t want to live close to one.
The only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do, in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look like the most affordable option, because they're not.
True. The same is true for nuclear energy. I never heard of a nuclear power plant that did not receive substantial subsidies throughout lifetime. Not to forget the nuclear fuel and the efforts required to create it and later to store it.
The natural gas turbines used are relatively efficient as far as engines go. Having them on-site makes transmission losses basically negligible.
Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
> as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.
Natural gas engines are efficient!
Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human lives not matter?
I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density!
1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.
2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!
3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."
4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria
> I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument.
Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I’ll try to respond.
That said, you’re putting forth your own disingenuous assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected to the grid.
Arguing pedantry about the word efficiency isn’t helpful either. The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that. The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
Disingenuous is acting like this is a permanent solution to the exclusion of others. The whole point is that it gets them started now with portable generation that is efficient.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
Unnecessarily smug?
Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to be built without much understanding of the public utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this argument.
> The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral timeframe that may or may not exist.
The gas turbines are hopefully an intermediate solution due to the long and not guaranteed process of grid connection and renewable buildout. History is of course full of such bets that did not work out the way their proponents hoped.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
It's obvious that you're starting from your conclusion and working backwards, which is probably how your initial comment was full of so much motivated reasoning to begin with.
In your mind, is there any set of negative externalities that would justify not building the data centers, or at least not building them now, or at least not building them now in specific areas that require these types of interim solutions?
This is exactly right. These are glorified emergency generators, and grid power is ordinarily far cheaper; especially for interruptible loads like training new models (checkpointing work in progress and resuming it later is cheap and easy). The article mentions that quite clearly.
And imagine all this poorly located, overpriced, haphazardly thrown together and polluting infrastructure will basically get flushed down the toilet once either the AI bubble pops, or they figure out a new way of doing AI that doesn't require terawatts of power.
The dialog around AI resource use is frustratingly inane, because the benefits are never discussed in the same context.
LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created:
> AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
>>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.
These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending.
xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
> xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
80ish% in the US live <100 miles from their hometown.
It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."
Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of people.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/generations/millennials-...
So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As long as human biology exists humans will solve for those problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes, ethno objects that come and go with the generations.
Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to the living.
Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.
The alternative to multiple jurisdictions racing to the bottom is strong centralized control to prevent anyone from racing to the bottom. That will be an even worse pill than datacenter pollution to swallow for Americans. Only the big cities are big enough to resist the race.
The phrasing 'historically black neighborhoods' feels like it pushes a specific agenda rather than just addressing the pollution.
It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.
Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people living there now.
It's because in the US historically black neighborhoods have a unique history of racism and disinvestment.
Here's an article about what happened literally where I'm sitting: https://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEE...
Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.
Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but the flip side of that argument is that whenever you do see higher investment and better amenities in a historically marginalized neighborhood, that gets loudly deplored by faux-progressive activists as harmful "gentrification" and "changing the character" of the neighborhood. Y'all should pick one stance or the other; you can't have it both ways!
So the thing about "Ya'll should ..." is that it's often mistaking "Group A and Group B hold conflicting beliefs but share a characteristic" with "Group C, all the people with this characteristic, all exhibit an incoherent belief structure".
For example suppose you apply this to the US Senate. So instead of Group A (Democrats and a those who caucus with them) and Group B (Republicans) we instead think there's a single Group C, Senators. Now their behaviour seems incoherent, this Group C seems to hold contradictory opinions and behaves irrationally, why can't they get their act together? The actual answer is that we misunderstood and they're not a single coherent group so that's why they don't act that way.
You might as well argue: "Part of my brain thought A at time Y. A different part of my brain had a different thought B, at a different time Z. Why the accusations of hypocrisy?"
The problem arises when an individual or group tries to represent themselves as more credible/consistent/coherent than they really are.
If you freely admit that you have multiple personality disorder, hypocrisy is to be expected from you as an individual. People know what they're in for.
If you respond to accusations of hypocrisy by saying: "Hm, that's a good point. I'll have to reflect and see if I can reach consistency here." Then people recognize you are making a good-faith effort.
I've observed that modern progressivism represents itself with a strong us/them boundary. The vociferousness of the rhetoric vastly outstrips the quality of the underlying reasoning/decision mechanism. And I've never seen a progressive say: "You make a good point, we'll have to debate on that."
You are correct that individual progressives may, in principle, be credible if they have a coherent philosophy which is consistently applied (including to critique their own "team" when appropriate).
But empirically, modern progressivism is more of a "meme ideology" where precepts are invoked when convenient, against whatever outgroup is currently fashionable. Progressive rhetoric, and progressive reasoning, is so flexible and untethered that if you're sufficiently talented at wielding it, it can be used to reach virtually any conclusion. The selective application of principles at the group level has strong parallels to how hypocrisy works at the level of an individual.
A movement can be meaningfully described as hypocritical, even if its individual members are not.
> I've never seen a progressive say: "You make a good point, we'll have to debate on that."
Humans are bad at that, and the ones who say it often don’t actually mean it. Some people claim their openness to debate, but that’s not the same as being open to changing one’s mind.
>I've never seen a progressive say: "You make a good point, we'll have to debate on that."
For what it's worth I had someone who identifies as progressive say something to that effect to me just last night.
It happens.
You're making a sweeping bad faith representation of progressives yourself.
It can simply be the case that your accusations of hypocrisy are wrong, because your entire characterization of the discussion/position is wrong.
I'm not going to say "you made a good point" because you flatly have not.
Double standards pervade the ideology dude.
“Women are terrible!”
“Uh, hey, that's pretty misogynistic.”
“Whoops, sorry, what I meant to say was, ‘White women are terrible!’”
“That's better.”
...
“Black men are violent!”
“That’s just a stereotype. Discriminating on the basis of immutable characteristics is wrong.”
“Whoops, sorry, what I meant to say was, ‘Men of all colors are violent!’”
“Right on, smash the patriarchy!”
https://substack.com/@plasmabloggin/note/c-160662902
There are dozens of cases like this. E.g. if you say white people are too powerful, that's enlightened. If you say Jews are too powerful, that's antisemitic. Double standards are the rule. Consistent, impartial application of principles is a very rare thing with this ideology.
You're attributing views to me I do not hold.
And frankly, you characterization of those views makes clear you're not interested in actual answers.
The primary issue with gentrification in historically black neighborhoods is that owners face the dilemma of having to leave their community to capture the increased property values.
For example, I live near the oldest black church in the PNW. Many of the older congregation members live in the area, and have low mobility. If we don't build a mix of housing that addresses their needs in downsizing, they end up having to effectively exile themselves from the community they've lived within for decades. They can't simply "move somewhere lower cost" without dramatic changes to their entire social world, just at an age where keeping those social ties takes a lot of effort.
I actually agree that building smaller/denser housing would be great and address the needs of many existing residents, but those same faux-progressive activists will decry that in the strongest terms, and insist that any increases in density will only further even worse gentrification and change the historical "flavor" of the neighborhood in extremely detrimental ways. Again, progressive activists cannot have it both ways; they should pick one or the other.
You totally crushed that strawman.
Or something. Yes, hypocrites are everywhere, but what are we debating here exactly?
That's a misreading of the term in the same way saying that the phrase 'black lives matter' imply white lives don't matter
The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.
If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient
What's uncomfortable is not the racism claim, but that the argument is merely a conjecture. It's lazy and dishonest. More importantly, this line of argument tends to shut down intelligent conversation, which this forum is about.
> It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.
I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.
That makes sense. For some reason though I still sense a hint of desire for retribution in the original comment
It makes more sense to word it like this when you take into consideration historical trends, like drowned towns for lakes or dams, highway system along redline, thriving neighbourhoods erased to create parks… often preceded by violence and little to no compensation.
I think this is an uncharitable interpretation.
My interpretation is it would be less likely to happen near a wealthy neighborhood compared to a poor neighborhood. Why talk about race if its not about race?
The correlation is extremely strong, especially in places like Memphis. And nobody said this particular neighborhood is poor.
Because it is about race.
Please read the article I linked in another reply to you.
My neighborhood was prosperous when it was systematically stolen from the black people who built it. They literally razed a thriving business district. And then the land sat empty for decades, only in the end to be sold to property developers.
They used eminent domain to steal people's homes and businesses in a way that was blatantly criminal, but the victims had no recourse given the courts and entire rest of the political structure was complicit in the actions.
And variations of this story played out everywhere across America.
So yes, the fact that a neighborhood is historically black is relevant, because it shows the events of today are part of a continued arc of injustice.
Who said they were poor?
Tulsa used to have a rich Black neighborhood.
it’s amazing to me how few people know what happened there.
Isn’t the Memphis city admin mainly composed of blacks?
The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.
The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.
You’re conflating race with poverty.
It feels racist to expect people to assume a neighborhood is 'resource poor' just because it is 'historically black'.
Also, the OP explicitly states that lawsuits are pending. Clearly, the community was able to mount a legal defense
> It feels racist to expect people to assume a neighborhood is 'resource poor' just because it is 'historically black'.
Statistically poverty is correlated with race. For reasons to do with (quite recent) history.
Statistics are not a license to assume.
Crime rates also statistically correlate with demographics, but if I assume a specific person is a criminal based on that stat, I would (rightly) be called racist.
Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor' similarly feels racist.
"Historically black" is a euphemism -- that's a term that makes people feel better about something awful -- which refers to the fact that for the majority of the last three hundred years people have been systematically, governmentally, socially and personally discriminated against because of the color of their skin, and that racism led to massive inequity reflected in wealth, income, education and standards of living.
The facts of history show this. It is not a subtle statistical effect.
People who argue the way that you have been are either woefully ignorant of this matter or are playing games trying to justify the status quo, or are just racist trolls. This isn't a FAQ on HN because it's a FAQ in real life.
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> Crime rates also statistically correlate with demographics, but if I assume a specific person is a criminal based on that stat, I would (rightly) be called racist.
Who said anything about a specific person? They are talking about a neighborhood, in a urban area in a region known for the endemic poverty in black-majority areas due to the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.
As a wise character once said, "poverty is a condition, not a crime".
> > Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor' similarly feels racist.
There are a few historically black communities in the US that are middle-class and prosperous, and Black Americans have made huge advances, but to this day, concentrations of Black American community prosperity tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
The question is how you check, qualify and--last but not least--apply the statistical findings. Are we trying to lift disadvantaged communities by providing extra resources and help people get on a better footing in life, or harassing individuals on the street because they have a certain skin color? I'm very eager to support the former and protest the latter.
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I don't know, what are we doing with these assumptions? Are we trying to lift disadvantaged communities by providing extra resources and help people get on a better footing in life, or harassing individuals on the street because they have a certain skin color? I'm very eager to support the former and protest the latter.
Crime is related with poverty which is related with race.
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe...
It's not that simple.
No, not like that. /s
You've got an extra actor in the mix that makes for a different argument and actually supports the idea that it's racist, I think.
Namely - I think most agree that it's racist to mindlessly assume race and poverty are correlated. The argument here is that the AI companies made that assumption - in other words, they're being called racists.
I don't think it's racist to speculate that a corporation, that made choices that specifically impact black neighborhoods, is racist.
It's because it's part of a more general pattern where bad things like this are preferentially done to black people. It's the same with highway locations. For some reason, when choosing where to demolish to build a highway, they prefer to demolish neighbourhoods with mostly black people.
Is that weighted by land cost?
When they bothered compensating, it was far from market value, so no.
These "gas turbines" are located next door to the Allen Combined Cycle Plant, a grid scale natural gas power plant with 1.1GW capacity. It's there to power a nearby steel mill. That's the kind of neighborhood xAI has put its cluster in.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment, and "environmental racism" just reeks of the usual agenda pushing.
How tall are the stacks at the combined cycle plant compared to the ones at the xAI datacenter?
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/xai-datacen...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/uPkQtSQzMZC3rPZB6
Seriously this: smoke stacks are a carefully engineered structure specially to ensure air emissions diffuse and don't roll along the ground.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnYdt4T76mk
You absolutely cannot park a bunch of truck mounted generators next to an existing plant and go "yeah it won't make a difference".
Once, when I was a child, I remember the carefully engineered smoke stacks in Sudbury Ontario spilling out acrid smoke sideways, and then straight down into the town.
Back then, Sudbury looked like Mars.
So you're saying when not done properly, emissions have very direct negative impact on the surrounding community. Did I get that right?
No theyre saying that since that day everyone has given up and nothing matters anymore. We all collectively decided that it is OKAY and didnt change a single thing since.
i’m curious, are you skeptical xai would wiggle around regulations and pollute a city?
by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.
That seems like an odd framing.
For my part I am prepared to accept that XAI might attempt to flout regulations. If I knew more about their operating practices I might even expect it. Even in that case I would not expect it to be the case that you could assume that they had done in any individual case.
While this isn't criminal law, the principle that underlies innocent until proven guilty still applies. I don't think it's acceptable do condemn people because you are assuming that they are doing the kind of thing you expect them to do. I think it is still incumbent upon accusers to make their case and for that accusation to be robustly challenged. Not just by people who stand something to gain by one outcome over another, but by people who want to find out the truth.
I tend to challenge ideas that support my viewpoint more than oppose, I find it incredibly irritating to encounter a flawed argument concluding something I agree with. Somewhat annoyingly it seems to cause people to assume I believe the opposite to what I actually believe, because there seems to be a presumption that you should accept all arguments in favour of your viewpoint no matter how bad they are. Apparently I'm not the right sort of team player.
>by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.
I don't see how you could in good faith reach that conclusion from reading the comment above. It seems to me to be talking about the agenda of people expressing concern for others. That's the "Think of the children" kind of argument. Invoking disadvantaged groups in this manner very rarely expresses the agenda of the groups in question, it is usually made by people claiming that there own agenda is in the interests of the group indicated, frequently without input from that group. I don't know it that is an accurate claim to make in this instance or not, but it is certainly not characterising having the ability to breath as an agenda.
You weaponized your argument, and perhaps showed your political leaning, by invoking "agenda pushing".
That immediately caused us to think "What's your agenda".
Another commenter wrote a rebuke - we're waiting for your response.
I did not invoke agenda pushing. I referred to the use of the term in the conversation above.
If anything my agenda here is to suggest to people that they should not imagine the opinions that exist in other people's minds and to respond to what they say and do.
If you must know my political leaning, It would be a non-relativistic form of far left. By non-relativistic I mean based upon a principle that is fixed cannot change. That principle is compassion. To some this makes me right wing because I reject demonisation of the wealthy, I defend radicalised people from abuse, I criticize the use of violent imagery like the guillotine by people who consider themselves Left wing. In simple political compass terms I am a left liberal. I don't feel that captures the sentiment exactly.
George Orwell once reflected on the term fascist, since due to his writing he was often called upon as an arbitor to categorize instances. Essentially concluding that the term had largely lost meaning due to people applying it to whatever they didn't like. He is often quoted with the same complaint that people have to this day. However most quotes do not place it fully in context. He wrote: "...almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist'. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come". I think there is a critical point here. My left wing principle of compassion goes against the principles of many self identifying left wing people of bullying those who's opinions they disagree with. That's not a progressive stance, it is taking the ground newly won by progressives as the new normal. In time they will come to fight the progressives as they remain stationary and the progressives, ...well, progress
“I reject demonisation of the wealthy” is quite an odd thing for someone identifying as “far left” to say. But then you go on to identify as a “left liberal” - canonically not considered far left - so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
Whether it’s worth demonizing anyone or not, we can condemn actions that hurt innocent people and we can maintain skepticism of the ultra-wealthy and their motives without “bullying”. It does sound like your principle of compassion extends a little too much towards capital and not enough towards labor.
Therein lies the rub, when people are surprised to see a left wing person criticising the idea of othering, you have to wonder what principles they have left to call left wing.
>we can condemn actions that hurt innocent people and we can maintain skepticism of the ultra-wealthy and their motives without “bullying”.
Indeed and I do condemn actions. What I don't do is conddemn people.
I am for robust regulation, free expression, free movement, worker rights, Limiting wealth inequality, free fundimental services of health educatiion. I want more police but with fewer powers. I support harm minimalization over punishing drug users, I favour rehabilitation in prison over training recidivists, I am against hate in all its forms. My most extreme views would be that advertising is inherently harmful to society, and teaching any religion as true to someone under the age of consent is child abuse.
All of these come from the principle that I think all people have feelings,worthless and rights, they deserve the best we can provide for them. If they disagree with you the first step is trying to understand their point of view.
To me, imposing your will on others, dismissing people for thinking the wrong thing, shunning them for saying the wrong thing or associating with 5he wrong people, these are all properties that stand at the other end of the spectrum to me. I don't particularly care what label you put on the ideology over there, but whatever it is, those are the attributes that have caused some of the darkest moments in h7man history.
Sure, I agree. Kneejerk condemnation and othering is bad.
But there’s a need to balance even-handedness with a healthy skepticism of those in power. Otherwise you risk becoming an apologist. No one is saying not to do your homework or not to think critically, but we’re also saying not to come in guns blazing in defense of moneyed interests. That’s what the person who brought up the hidden agenda stuff seemed to be doing - making assumptions that favor capital without even taking the time to read the article that addressed those assumptions. That’s not even-handed, it’s biased against labor.
Consider the original post I responded to. It asked two questions.
>are you skeptical xai would wiggle around regulations and pollute a city?
But they were responding to I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment which makes no claim as to whether they might obey or disobey regulations, the words "putting a dent" in the local envionnent*
The data from the article does not sufficiently address this, it uses satellite data and a short time frame. Without specifying the resolution of their data (which could be kilometer sized pixels) their claims about locality is in doubt. In short term measures, trends are harder to spot, a rise over months could just mean it is less windy in the nollowing season. Without a ground level meadurement of the air quality and a evaluation of the total local emission from all sources, you cannot hope to measure the health impact of a single cause.
None of that says that they are not polluting. What it says is that this is not evidence of it. Someone expressed skepticism based on the proportional emission of one of many of their ability to move the dial, and was challenged based upon the likelihood of what they might do. Claiming skeptasism that a thief could rob Fort Knox, is not a claim that the thief is honest
>by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air?
I simply cannot believe that this is a reasonable interpretation of what they said.
That's the thing that motivated me to post on this thread. That the first post I responded to here was attacking the player, not the ball.
I continue to post replies here out of my own sense of duty to fully explain my position to promote understanding, I'm not trying to win anything here, I only want people to see a honestly held perspective.
What "flawed argument" ? All facts and evidence have been provided - the measured nitrogen dioxide increase of ~80% will harm the respiratory system. Folks who cause harm should be punished not excused.
I am not referring to any particular argument here, I mentioned it to place in context one of my motivations to challenging ideas is to seek the truth, not to prove my point of view correct.
It was bought up here because it seemed like the post I was replying to was contesting the reasons for making a point rather than the point it was making.
>Folks who cause harm should be punished not excused.
In this instance I think the issue is not think that was suggested otherwise. The issue was more of Are the claims true, Does it have the impact stated, and who caused them.
Personally I do not want those who cause harm to be punished. I want them to not cause harm. Seeking vengeance on harm already done is unlikely to lead to an understanding of why their actions were harmful. It motivates them to not get caught in future, I would much rather they not want to harm.
Here are some quotes from an article [1] that directly addresses your point:
> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.
> The turbines are only temporary and don’t require federal permits for their emissions of NOx and other hazardous air pollutants like formaldehyde, xAI’s environmental consultant, Shannon Lynn, said during a webinar hosted by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The argument appears to rely on a loophole in federal regulations that environmental groups and former EPA officials say shouldn’t apply to the situation.
> Mayo and Lynn didn’t respond to calls and texts from POLITICO’s E&E News requesting comment and have not said publicly how much longer the “temporary” turbines will remain onsite. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
As you can see, xAI is being deliberately deceptive here and this has been known, but unaddressed for a while now. Remember that we are talking about a grave threat to the health and life of the entire population of a town. That too in a country where healthcare is deliberately unaffordable to ordinary folks. I don't know if you know how nasty formaldehyde and NOx smells.
How do you so casually trivialize and vilify such concerns as 'agenda pushing'? It's very sad that HN has too many apologists for these greedy serial violators and abusers. At the same time, the sheer lack of empathy towards the unprivileged is appalling! They're humans too!
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
A thousand bots can spread a thousand lies faster than we can dispell them, but giving up the public square to them is worse.
What a situation...
Thank you for pointing to these details!
You're welcome! And as you pointed out in your other comment, it's a bit frustrating when someone tries to sow doubt on well-established facts.
That plant is subject to regulations. The xAI turbines have evaded regulations by claiming that they are portable.
You're not very off the the mark. To add in that extra detail, xAI is using portable gas turbines that are meant for providing emergency backup power in case of a catastrophic loss of power, like in the event of a natural disaster. Being portable, they lack the systems necessary to avoid polluting the surrounding air with oxides of nitrogen and formaldehyde - really nasty stuff. That shouldn't normally cause a serious issue, since the turbines are meant for temporary backup alone. But at Memphis, xAI is stretching the meaning of 'temporary'.
This stance strikes me as questionable, to use the first hunch that comes to mind to seed doubt in a topic that is researched and reported by multiple fairly reputable sources and multiple people on the ground.
Or the usual Musk externalizing costs and letting someone else handle the cleanup. Who's going to fine him? The government?
Polluting the environment in any form is a violation of property rights. It’s unfortunate our government hasn’t codified that reality.
My neighbor’s don’t have a right to pollute my property by shining a bright light on it or blowing smoke into it or dumping chemicals into my underground well. Even if it’s mostly legal, it’s still a violation of my underlying right to property
Ah so because they're black people and they're already near _some_ pollution, we can just add _more_ pollution since they won't notice.
/s because some of you are fucking psychopaths
Just because one corp does something x bad, it means some other corp is ok to do something 10x bad?
There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.
We can sue to shut down pollution generators? Finally, I can get rid of that annoying airport...
Adding to their sins, many of those airports are in "historically black neighborhoods", you know!
I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.
My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).
Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.
Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-air-p...
Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.
That is true of gas stoves, but gas furnaces don't exhaust into the house.
Lower efficiency gas furnaces don’t have a completely sealed exhaust and rely on a draft for pollutant evacuation. This usually works good enough when properly installed and maintained but can be a source of indoor air pollution. Although typically minimal.
And there are also decorative and/or supplemental gas heating devices which exhaust into the home.
But gas turbines do vent to their neighbors’ air, which is the main point here.
>I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.
it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.
What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.
Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time, which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.
You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.
They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions can be very low if done correctly.
Global issues start locally. See: tragedy of the commons
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Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was there for what, a decade already? Before it, there was a coal power plant there too.
Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.
That plant is subject to regulation and the xAI turbines evade regulations by claiming they are "portable".
I just looked, and you're right. It's in an industrial area several km from homes, and near existing NG facilities, including one where they flare gas.
https://www.facebook.com/abacustrategic/posts/pfbid02rrUwoWM...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fYwcSi8vfPBnsYeK7
I don't doubt that it is a source of pollution, but I agree that this is overblown in the same was as the claims that datacentres are using up all the fresh water.
It's not overblown. That plant has sufficient pollution filters installed. You can find more info elsewhere in this comment section.
But it's still not localized to the one neighbourhood in the Time article any more than any other in Memphis (or even West Memphis across the river).
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Why is the skin tone of the residents of the affected community relevant?
In the US, we have a living history of discriminatory policies based on race
https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis
Yeah. I've heard about it. So this wouldn't be a problem if it affected a different group of people?
Probably not because if it affected white neighborhoods, it either wouldn't be enacted, shut down after complaints, or receive enough bad press as to be shut down.
That's a lot of assumptions. If they wanted that to be the point of the article they could have done it a lot more explicitly.
It isn't affecting (and historically doesn't affect) the "different group" though. That's the point.
It would be the exact same problem, and equally bad.
I agree. Which is why I think that detail is not relevant and just a distraction.
Because the people who decided where to locate it and the people in government who could do something to stop it make decisions about how much they care based on those folks’ skin color. If those generators were placed near a rich white neighborhood, the government response would be wildly different.
Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.
And TFA addresses this. South Memphis was a community largely composed of freed slaves, where manufacturers set up shop, the military dumped waste (now a superfund site), and people have continued to mark the area for polluting industries for generations.
To be fair they would definitely do this to rural and/or poor white people too.
Maybe. East Palestine OH got a decent amount of political attention.
TFA said it's all legal and explicit federal policy. You don't have to like it, but some people are going to have to make minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services. Look on the bright side, when these people all have personal robot doctors caring for them well into their 100s they will be grateful they didn't listen to the NIMBYs
> some people are going to have to make minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services
_Does_ the majority want AI services? I feel like the question “if you could stop AI, would you?” is far too controversial for this to be the case.
Would you be willing to volunteer and make that sacrifice for the majority?
I honestly cannot tell if this is satire. Literally a Lord Farquaad level take. Some of you may get asthma and lung cancer, but that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make to ensure we can deliver MechaHitler to the masses.
It’s cute they describe this as a solution to _the_ power problem. It’s a solution to _their_ power problem. We have a grid problem. This massive amount of investment would be an incredible time to do something about it. Instead we’ve got an administration hostile to modern energy solutions and an industry hostile to everyone. Really depressing to see all this money go up in smoke in such a massive short sighted rush.
I previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side.
My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.
I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.
Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.
On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.
As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
so we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end - residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago). That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration wave.
Kinda proving that these are a bad deal for communities - very few jobs and tax revenues, but enjoy the increased asthma and cancer we all get to pay for.
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Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W.
So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
Is it though? When I ask an LLM research questions, it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.
Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.
Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.
If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for the same amount of work.
> it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.
In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.
LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.
Training energy is amortized across the lifespan of a model. For any given query for the most popular commercial models, your share of the energy used to train it is a small fraction of the energy used for inference (e.g. 10%).
For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant. This is apart from the fact that right now we are at a choke point where it's much more important to generate less CO2 than it is to write scientific simulation code a little quicker (and most people are using AI for much more unnecessary stuff like marketing)
> For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant.
That is certainly not a logical leap I'm making. AI doesn't make anybody redundant, the same way mechanized farming didn't. It just frees them up to do more productive things.
Now consider whether LLM's will ultimately speed up the technological advancements necessary to reduce CO2? It's certainly plausible.
Honest question - what are artists being freed up to do that’s more important? DoorDash?
Honest answer - making more art.
Think about how much cloud computing and open sourced changed it so you could launch a startup with 3 engineers instead of 20. What happened? An explosion of startups, since there were so many more engineers to go around. The engineers weren't delivering pizzas instead.
Same thing is happening with anything that needs more art -- the potential for video games here is extraordinary. A trained artist is way more effective leveraging AI and handling 10x the output, as the tools mature. Now you get 10x more video games, or 10x more complex/larger worlds, or whatever it is that the market ends up wanting.
Reality is they’re just getting fired.
Except reality is they're not. If you want to argue the contrary, show the statistics that unemployment among digital artists is rising.
So many people make this mistake when new technologies come out, thinking they'll replace workers. They just make workers more productive. Sometimes people do end up shifting to different fields, but there's so much commercial demand for art assets in so many things, the labor market shrinking is not the case for digital artists right now.
How so? A human needs the entire civilisation to be productive at that level. If you take a just the entire US electricity consumption and divide it by its population, you'll get a result that's an order of magnitude higher. And that's just electricity. And that's just domestic consumption, even though US Americans consume tons of foreign-made goods.
you didn't consider the 18+ years we have with almost no productivity and the extra resources required to sustain life
Ah! And don't get me started about how specific its energy source must be! Pure electricity, no less! Where a human brain comes attached with an engine that can power it for days on a mere ham sandwich!
try to calculate 12312312.123213 * 123123.3123123
A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.
It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.
EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.
A GenAI does not, however.
GenAI completely fails to even get the right answer to numeric problems
Not with tool calling?
How much energy did evolution "spend" to get us here?
I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.
That’s about the energy a laptop or two uses at full tilt.
You can't compare a training run that produces a file which can be run forever after to a human day
Inference itself is also very costly!
But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?
Not really.
I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15 seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to type.
Is "faster" really what we are talking about right now? It could be a lot faster to take a helicopter to work everyday too, versus riding a bike.
Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
Speed highly correlates with power efficiency. I believe my hardware maxes out somewhere around 150W. 15 seconds of that isn't much at all.
> Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in general anything that serves millions of requests in a small footprint is going to look pretty big.
There's a billion users. Why do we make massive cities and factories and fields if humans only need 2000 calories a day
idk, why?
Because there's a lot of people
> It could be a lot faster to take a helicopter to work everyday too, versus riding a bike.
Great analogy.
It's not a good analogy at all, because of what they said about mundane hardware. They're specifically not talking about any kind of ridiculous wattage situation, they're talking about single GPUs that need fewer watts than a human in an office to make text faster than a human, or that need 2-10x the watts to make video a thousand times faster.
It's a Framework Desktop motherboard. I believe the CPU on that maxes out somewhere around 150W.
An LLM gives AN answer. If you ask for not many more than that it gets confused, but instead of acting in a human-like way, it confidently proceeds forward with incorrect answers. You never quite know when the context got poisoned, but reliability drops to 0.
There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...
The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).
Okay, but this has vanishingly little to do with the comment chain you replied to, which was about energy efficiency.
Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously.
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
And then we get this gem...
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.
> What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.
I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.
Are you sure they don't have a vested interest? At least ChatGPT gave me sources.
It doesn't matter who they are if there's nothing backing it up.
The entire article is predicated on the fact that this is profitable long term.
Again: > An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
Yet this simple fact isn't justified at all nor is it stated what "AI cloud" actually is or how they got to those numbers.
Does anyone know a really good source for basic information estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong reactions that tend to cloud the facts.
Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?
Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)
US grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find.
So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546
For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
Thanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing.
1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)
Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.
Our kids are not going to be happy we spun up more CO2 generation for this.
their uploaded minds will enjoy the infinite AI slop though
I hear they LOVE Sanctuary Moon.
What about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?
How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...
Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by power, by all means, offer users a discount when their queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to save cents to fill up their tanks - you can’t say there isn’t precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better question is, is it really a constraint?
Doesnt really work, as the biggest cost is buying GPUs etc which has to be paid for, and leaving them idle when the sun isnt shining doesnt pay the purchase costs. Their are industries where this does work though.
The customers time is not flexible like that.
And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
> The customers time is not flexible like that.
A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible. Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use naturally follows the sun anyway.
> And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
Some companies already have more chips than they can feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle part of the night.
You both are talking about this stuff as if it is a new concept. Demand-based pricing is already commonplace for both electricity and compute.
The demand for both compute and electricity is higher while people are awake and using them. But not all demand is realtime, and some will shift in response to prices.
> The customers time is not flexible like that.
haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually quite flexible
Reciprocating natural gas engines can be moved from [concrete] pad to pad and be up and running in under 24 hours. The portable turbines take longer but they’re still fast.
Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.
The density required for solar is also much lower - the coordination between different land parcels and routing power and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem gas turbines.
Takes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front investment, and requires a lot more land.
The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
land. compute what surface you need for 1 GW of solar
This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."
It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.
More like it’s a really long way to say the government has utterly failed at making sure electricity generation and transmission capacity keeps up with demand so datacenters have been forced to get creative with alternative ways to power themselves. These companies absolutely want to use renewable energy from the power grid but the government blew it.
> This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."
Like every other industry in the world?
I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.
The difference is they are new. It’s not rational but people on the whole generally are ok with the status quo of how the sausage is made largely because they don’t really think about it. But new systems being spun up provide an entry point for a discussion. Ideally that discussion can then be widened and open up an opportunity for wider scale change. Or nothing happens and it all becomes the new status quo which most don’t think about again.
The difference is that the food industry at least feeds me and a house provides me shelter. The people in charge of building AI data centers intend to replace all labor in using my own and leave me begging for peanuts, while also making energy and many goods more expensive and ruining the environment
FYI Fairly certain this account is a bot. Acct created in 2023 and has 36k karma
Email the mods, don’t post about it
We need food and housing. We don't need AI.
I enjoyed the detailed article despite how depressing it is. I never can blame business for finding a market-palatable solution.
However, it is worth saying that xAI’s “solution” was illegal, unhealthy for the local constituents, and stinks of corruption, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da....
The problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not going to be flexible enough to take new demand.
It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.
I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
So all the predictable arguments aside...
Why is no one talking about the "other grid" capacity here?
Natural gas at this scale cannot be delivered by truck. It's piped in direct from fields, typically.
When do we run out of natural gas "grid" capacity in these locations? I can't imagine we're that overbuilt compared to the electrical grid itself?
The big freeze in Texas is a recent example of the natural gas grid having localized "brownouts" due to a few factors - one of which being the demand of all the natural gas peakers trying to fire at once.
Seems like this is the next infrastructure piece to have a supply crunch to me? There are places (North Dakota) so contranstrained by capacity to deliver gas to the "grid" that they simply flare it off because it's cheaper to pay the government to do that vs. lay pipe. This implies to me that natural gas is about to become more valuable.
Economic * need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid.
*greed.
We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is anything but a distribution of income problem.
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.
I mean, the claim is certainly nonsensical in the sense that this isn't something Wärtsilä just "realized". They have been in the power plant business for decades. In the oldest financials they have online (the annual report for year 2000) their power plant sales are larger than their marine engine sales.
Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists.
But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?
They likely use multiple engines.
I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative.
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.
> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!
The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.
[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...
[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...
It’s called “Semi” analysis for a reason. Dylan Patel is the Jim Cramer of industry reporting for this sector.
More appropriate word is “sly” not “clever”.
Here's my guess: there are lots of datacenters being built in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois [1]. Also in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Utah.
I think the first 5 states have this in common: there are lots of coal burning power plants that were shut down, but can be restarted and hooked to the grid on a relatively short notice. The grid is also quite good in this region.
In Texas, it is likely that new power can be generated with a combination of solar, wind, gas, and fast permitting.
I don't have an explanation for Georgia.
For Arizona, and perhaps Nevada and Utah too, I think it is likely to be solar.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/data-center-growth-map-stat...
Don't know about the others, but Illinois permanently shut down (and demolished or repurposed the land) the majority of its coal power plants over the past couple decades.
Illinois gets about half its power from nuclear (we have 6 plants and 11 reactors), followed by natural gas at around 20%, and then about equal amounts of coal and wind, at around 10-15%.
So Illinois is actually a pretty decent place to build datacenters, from a clean power generation perspective.
https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=IL
Title should be "AI labs are raping the planet"
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive. xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.
Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything else.
I'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles - their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as they see it.
The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
"Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but rather sociopathic.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Youve posted the same think like 4 times now
I'm not sure if this matters. The illegality of the article's central premise seems like an important point excluded from the article.
"xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines."
So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel. Got it.
And all without the proper permits! Using 35 generators when they were only allowed 15! Yay! So glad we're allowing AI companies to break law after law after law to not be able to reason logically the basic Towers of Hanoi.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
There's not a single mention of pollution or clean energy or the environment in the entire article. Presumably the regulatory requirements for these generators are less stringent than for proper power plants, so the costs are pushed onto the rest of society (having to deal with the environmental impact) while Microsoft et al. keep the profits?
I found Boom's pivot much less confusing after this article.
For those like me that are missing context:
https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...
Boom’s pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers wasn’t surprising when data center deployments started using turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking point.
What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
> What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”
I had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in airplanes were more different from the turbines in power plants than they actually are.
Boom doesn’t actually have a turbine yet. Their design partner publicly pulled out of their contract with Boom a while ago.
Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It’s one of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever they’re doing in public is just PR right now. Until they actually produce something (other than a prototype that doesn’t resemble their production goals using other people’s parts) their PR releases don’t mean a whole lot.
What I didn't get is afair Boom doesn't build engines, aren't they using some old 50s-60s fighter jet engines?
Cool article. It's pretty weird that the writer seems to attribute all decisions by xAI to Mr. Musk personally. I doubt he is closely involved in such technical projects.
Isn't spinning up huge amounts of power on inefficient engines going to make climate impacts worse?
I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.
If you make it more efficient, then you train it for longer or make it larger. You're not going to just idle your GPUs.
And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's going to use your model if someone else has a better model.
They are already power-constrained. Any efficiency improvements would immediately be allocated to more AI.
What makes you think that the entire process isn't being made more efficient? There are entire papers dedicated to pulling out more FLOPs from GPUs so that less energy is being wasted on simply moving memory around. Of course, there's also inference side optimizations like speculative decoding and MoE. Some of these make the training process more expensive.
The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.
> However, AI infrastructure cannot wait for the grid’s multiyear transmission upgrades. An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Getting a 400 MW datacenter online even six months earlier is worth billions. Economic need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid. The industry is already searching for new solutions.
wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with that.
This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
the rather uninformed question I had: but answered in comments below
was why not solar ? Yeah Hydrocarbons have no competition if you have to deploy power quickly
1.2GW is a small turbine - compared to the land & battery needed for Solar.
how about Gas ? if you're building in the middle of nowhere ? & there's no gas lines ?
If you just paid a jillion dollars for a shiny new AI datacenter, would you be ok with just running it during the day?
Tesla is a battery company
Battery capacity is still better at short duration shifting- milliseconds, minutes- all night is tough. The xAI mega pack can only do 4 hours according to the article.
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
Citation needed.
This is coming from a group that does analysis on the semiconductor and cloud industries and provided very expensive access to their models and info. They are the citation.
So I guess it’s not a bubble then since these companies are raking in the big revenues? Or maybe they are counting all those circular investments as revenues somehow?
You can make a lot of money but still be in a bubble if speculation is significantly higher than (actual or potential) revenue.
I think that's most people's assumption. It's not that AI is worthless, but that it's significantly less valuable than investors are betting on.
Revenue isn't profit, and the presence or absence of either, separately or jointly, isn't sufficient to determine there is a bubble.
I mean, if so then they are lying through their teeth.
Based on what? I’m inclined to trust a well known industry analyst over an HN comment with no basis.
Fair enough, but it has been stated over and over that OpenAI's (as well as others) plan for profit is subscriptions. If their revenue predictions are based on that, then like others have said, it is mathematically impossible.
Have you considered that the industry analysis might be a biased source since they are all in on a economic model that must grow at all costs or it collapses? Do you trust McKinsey consulting because they give industry analysis? Blind trust in these corporate entities is how we get Enron, WorldCom, and an opioid crisis.
But hey, I'm just some asshole on the internet. Carry on.
Even if that’s true, that seems like a putrid number, no?
Assuming a single 1GW the data center runs 24/7 365, it’s consuming 8.76 TwH per year. Only being able to generate $10-$12B in revenue (not profit) per year while consuming as much electricity as the entire state of Hawaii (1.5M people) seems awful.
If you do the math, that's $10-$12 per watt year. There's approx 24×365.25=8766 hours in a year, so assuming that the datacenters would be running 24×7, that boils down to $1.14 to $1.37 in revenue per kWh. That's not a bad deal if power really is a major part of the expense.
As far as I can tell, power isn't actually a major part of the expense, it's dwarfed by the capex. Just the amortization on the GPU will be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the power to run the GPU at 100%. (Assuming a 5 year depreciation period.)
“Could”, sure... and I “could” fly if I strapped a jet engine to my ass
Interesting choice of names: "Solar Turbines" - a wholly owned Caterpillar subsidiary that designs and manufactures industrial gas turbines.
That said, it is all pretty impressive.
Power problem: solved
Natural Gas supply problem: worsened
Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened
Yeah I guess I'm not the target audience for this because I assumed that "the power problem" was "massive increase in electricity costs for people despite virtually unchanged usage on their part", not "AI companies have to wait too long to be able to start using even more power than they already are":
> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.
> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
I understand the instinct but if people seriously think that they are solving any problem by unplugging cell phone chargers, they are simply bad at math. Human time is easily worth more than that, even when working at minimum wage.
That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I have not done the math.
They are not necessarily bad at math, but they probably aren't electricians or EEs or have ever needed or been asked to calculate how much power a cell phone charger uses.
Mom/Dad used to unplug things and turn lights off, so they do too.
I think it's also just how people start acting in situations where they can't control anything that would make a difference. In the presence of an issue you can't solve, if you can do something, even if it's small and won't really help, sometimes it feels good to at least do that. Being able to address the anxiety even a little a bit still might be worthwhile.
They don't know it doesn't help. That's what you're missing.
How many paid hours do they get? Human time isn't fungible with paid hours.
And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors.
This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.
I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.
https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...
> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai
Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.
If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.
What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office; maybe the workload just shrank a bit; maybe they’re worried about the economic outlook for next year…
Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use AI at all. Maybe they were more efficient before AI but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?
Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people and AI that would take other companies 8-25 people. A brand new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it or contracting with company B. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Whose job(s)?
> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai.
Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.
It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical fuckups of the government
I assumed gas plants are pretty good in terms of air quality?
Coal plants are bad.
In the case of Grok's turbines, no emissions controls means sick people. Plus all the CO2 pushing climate collapse faster which hurts every coming generation.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Gas plants are not bad… but imagine 400 MW of gas plants in a concentrated area. You’ll always have NOx and SOx by products whenever you’re burning gas.
It depends on if they treat the exhaust to remove nitrogen oxides. Not sure what the standard is for this kind of plant though.
Gas is certainly less of a problem than coal, but they still produce plenty of bad stuff: nitrogen oxides and bad VOCs like formaldehyde that are well studied to increase risk of asthma and some types of cancer. I certainly wouldn’t want to live close to one.
The word 'pollution' appears exactly one time in this entire thing, the word 'community' or 'communities' never.
The only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do, in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look like the most affordable option, because they're not.
A carbon tax, you say? 9 out of 10 economists agree, and dozens of voters. Dozens!
[That read as snark, didn't it? Sorry. I absolutely, completely, 100% agree with everything you say.]
True. The same is true for nuclear energy. I never heard of a nuclear power plant that did not receive substantial subsidies throughout lifetime. Not to forget the nuclear fuel and the efforts required to create it and later to store it.
This website appears to be very AI heavy in articles. I think it's fair to say these articles are biased because of that.
The natural gas turbines used are relatively efficient as far as engines go. Having them on-site makes transmission losses basically negligible.
Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
> as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.
Natural gas engines are efficient!
Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human lives not matter?
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density!
1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.
2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!
3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."
4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria
> I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument.
Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I’ll try to respond.
That said, you’re putting forth your own disingenuous assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected to the grid.
Arguing pedantry about the word efficiency isn’t helpful either. The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that. The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
Disingenuous is acting like this is a permanent solution to the exclusion of others. The whole point is that it gets them started now with portable generation that is efficient.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
Unnecessarily smug?
Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to be built without much understanding of the public utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this argument.
> The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral timeframe that may or may not exist.
The gas turbines are hopefully an intermediate solution due to the long and not guaranteed process of grid connection and renewable buildout. History is of course full of such bets that did not work out the way their proponents hoped.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
It's obvious that you're starting from your conclusion and working backwards, which is probably how your initial comment was full of so much motivated reasoning to begin with.
In your mind, is there any set of negative externalities that would justify not building the data centers, or at least not building them now, or at least not building them now in specific areas that require these types of interim solutions?
This is exactly right. These are glorified emergency generators, and grid power is ordinarily far cheaper; especially for interruptible loads like training new models (checkpointing work in progress and resuming it later is cheap and easy). The article mentions that quite clearly.
Yeah, that headline made me think "Oh good, there's some solution on the horizon that won't require absurd amounts of electricity."
Not so.
Coincidentally the USA is more than self sufficient in natural gas and is a net exporter. Drill baby drill!
supply is finite
And imagine all this poorly located, overpriced, haphazardly thrown together and polluting infrastructure will basically get flushed down the toilet once either the AI bubble pops, or they figure out a new way of doing AI that doesn't require terawatts of power.
... and, all this for what ?
TL;DR by saying fuck environment
TLDR: They're not reducing power consumption, they're just also using gas now. Buckle up for higher prices, the AI slop factory needs more power.
The dialog around AI resource use is frustratingly inane, because the benefits are never discussed in the same context.
LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created:
> AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x