We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]

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>5GW consumption I assume is per day?

GW is already a measure of rate of energy use. You can talk about GWh per day (which is really just another way of saying 0.041 GW), but GW per day is only sensible in the context of a ramp in power consumption.

Assuming the original source of that number didn't incorrectly conflate GWh into GW, that puts your comparison as underestimating the energy usage 24-fold.

> Yet increasing the power consumption of an area by 25X over a few years requires a significant amount of transmission and distribution infrastructure upgrades to make that happen

Not if you put your data-center right next to the power station.

> The 5GW consumption I assume is per day? If so, that’s on par with 170,000 average homes… being put in a parish with around 7250 households.

Watts are Joules per second, you'd only measure "watts per day" as a rate of change of power supply, not absolute power supply.

Also, 5GW / 170000 homes ≈ 29kW/home, even the USA isn't that heavily supplied with electricity.

(My home in Germany is very efficient, 0.5 kW average, including heating and cooling as well as all devices).

I've heard 5GW touted as the capacity (so like 120GWH per day if flat loaded at 100%). However that is clearly B.S as I've also heard 2GW and another much more sensible number

Just to give perspective 5GW would power about 10 Million H100s or about 5 million G200. Completely farcical, won't happen.

Total rewrite of my previous reply:

There's a 7-million-sqft data center near Reno that claims 650MW capacity. Zuck says his will be 4 million sqft. So that doesn't really get us to 5GW unless we're going vertical.

To be fair, datacenter power density has skyrocketed over time: https://www.ramboll.com/en-us/insights/decarbonise-for-net-z...

These are being built at the same time, so any trends over time are not in play.

If they averaged only 60KW per rack that would be about 1.7Million sqft of 'white floor space' or about 3-4 million sqft gross building size.