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504 points Terretta | 7 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Shakahs ◴[] No.45068700[source]
Grok are the first models I am boycotting on purely environmental grounds. They built their datacenter without sufficient local power supply and have been illegally powering it with unpermitted gas turbine generators until that capacity gets built, to the significant detriment of the local population.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musk-xai-gas...

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nonethewiser ◴[] No.45068962[source]
It would be nice if they could get more power online faster.
replies(1): >>45069032 #
Tadpole9181 ◴[] No.45069032[source]
Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.
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1. declan_roberts ◴[] No.45069482[source]
Solar and wind are not adequate power supply for a data center. You think data centers only run for 8 hours a day?
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2. GrifMD ◴[] No.45069534[source]
That's a bad faith argument and you know it. More power is more power. These projects weren't taking away from development of other power plants.
3. gwbas1c ◴[] No.45069583[source]
That's what these are for: https://www.tesla.com/megapack
4. namibj ◴[] No.45070055[source]
They're VERY suitable for such trivially deferrable workloads as (much of) AI (specifically, LLM pretraining and other similar training).
replies(1): >>45070317 #
5. Jabrov ◴[] No.45070317[source]
What makes you think it’s a deferrable workload? Companies don’t buy all that expensive hardware to just have it sit there inactive.
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6. namibj ◴[] No.45071227{3}[source]
You're conflating two things that shouldn't be:

(1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware; (2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster.

For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough.

For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes. And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.

7. Tadpole9181 ◴[] No.45071350[source]
Most people aren't programming or operating heavy machinery at 4AM, either. Most power is consumed in the day, and most AI will be leveraged in the day.