> I’m comfortable estimating that North American data center absorption — as the IT load of data centers actually turned on and in operation — was at around 3GW for 2025, which would work out to about 3.9GW of total power.
> And that number is a fucking disaster.
To me that number is reassuring. I was worried that all this Sam Altman plans to build 12GW per month stuff was going to fry the planet.
If the whole lot so far runs on less than one Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant then that actually seems kind of reasonable. Also I'm skeptical the path to AGI is ever larger data centers - there seems much that could be done in terms of better algorithms and design. I don't think human brains update every neural connection for each word when training which is probably partly why they get by on 20W rather than 20KW.
> And that number is a fucking disaster.
To me that number is reassuring. I was worried that all this Sam Altman plans to build 12GW per month stuff was going to fry the planet.
If the whole lot so far runs on less than one Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant then that actually seems kind of reasonable. Also I'm skeptical the path to AGI is ever larger data centers - there seems much that could be done in terms of better algorithms and design. I don't think human brains update every neural connection for each word when training which is probably partly why they get by on 20W rather than 20KW.