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Likely at lower pay than before, and also only temporary until they think the ai is ready.
All those coal miners can go back to mining coal once ai has taken their coding jobs. The server farms will need it.
The people who want their AI aren't the same people who were pushing wanting to clean up the environment. Your comment makes it seem like "they" are a group that changed their mind.
https://sustainabilityexchange.amazon.com/credits
The idea of a 7.5 gw datacenter sound really "big" to me, enough to feel like this is a way off presentation of the situation by the NYTimes.
that because the projects and that numbers city come from projects that are a lot like the one being talked about, with phase one being about 5-10% of that figure and some projects will have 4-5 demands for different site and will be approved and use a maximum of one (the one with the fastest timeline or best price) actual demand is way lower here.
Joking aside, the do it all big AI systems seems to be the wrong target. Smaller, independent, locally run specialized systems that can link up as needed for a given problem seems like a better use of AI.You think Amazon was pro-environment at any point? They're like most corporations, they advertise what sells.
The datacenters will quickly realize they won't be generating their own power. The initial investment for hundreds of megawatts or multiple gigawatts is not economical or even feasible with a few dozen peaker style units. It would cost about $2B dollars, and their electricity price ammortized would be 3-4x more expensive than grid electricity.
Certainly not.
It is also about their own employees pressure and retention, they tend to attract employees that love those initiative, I think all those google of the world would be ready to pay a little bit more for Nuclear vs gas if it please them (the employees), a lot of their workforce will be uneasy working for what became big industrial-emission company.
Distribution is a giant part of the final electricity price, that why industrial can often get much cheaper deal with much simpler distrubution per watts infracstructure (in Canada industy pay cheaper rate and yet they are the one that subsidy residential rate which run at a loss being the norm), on location natural gaz that you can use a lot yourself must be compeittive with grids, specially for those with the ability to resell extra. On location tend to be the simplest distrubution, thus the cheapest way.
I work for a utility and grid supplier, so that's where I'm getting the numbers from since I see it every day. I can tell you that your assumptions are dead wrong.
Cost of living should be the primary focus for anyone. What's sad is that everyone knows AI is flawed but they don't care. They want extreme surveillance and they want to use it to blackmail people. AI may create mistakes, but that's a risk they're will to take. I know you're referencing China, but it isn't China pushing for AI. It isn't China that's currently the most hated country in the world.
Can you walk the step, how a giant user making natural gaz electricity with a direct and simple-short line to themselve will cost them 3x-4x more than the giant user buying it from people that make natural gaz electricity, that has to do a complex transmission of it and a profit ?
China obviously did not made it illegal to replace human worker by AI... a court judged a work contract between an employee and a company was broken when they did it, if that where the meme come from:
Not sure we're in the same country so it may not be the same where you are. The smaller plants are not as efficient for one - mostly due to little or no cogen capability, the cost of construction is more - relative to output capacity, the maintenance costs are higher and downtime costs are detrimental since you have to pay millions per year in grid service fees regardless, they have to pay all the ecological and environmental fees and taxes that come along with power generation on site, etc. I could go on for pages long of why it costs more. I can't give exact figures of datacenters who already ran the numbers in my service zone, but they were far above (200%+) the yearly cost of what we could provide via the grid. We also have had municipalities believe they could provide power to their community of 20k-30k people for cheaper with better reliability, and they determined they could not after residents switched out of their contracts because they didn't like paying $0.25-0.35/kWh where our company was providing for $0.08-$0.12/kWh. Those plants are now abandoned with only 3-5 years of runtime and tens of millions of dollars of debt.
is a 2 billion level plant for that amount of gigawatt being mentionned, really a smaller plant too ?
Colossus have been quite profitable and they do tend to be (datacenter) quite profitable. Google, amazon, etc... they made fortune with datacenter for a decade
Not sure we are talking about a small unit here, (a gigawatt of power that what around what you use to power 750,000/800,000 houses) This is not a small town type of affair, closer to a good metro scale level. The whole max project if it ever get made is close to the biggest gas fired plant in the world here, power wise. Is a 1 gigawatt level of capacity pretty much already at the best sweat spot efficacy ? (how much difference versus the bigger power block you have in mind)
Already:
Yes colossus 1 has been widely profitable, they rent it for 1.25 billion a month, it did cost about 3-4 billion to build. We would need to go achieved to be build and been running for a while case by case, but they tend to have been doing really well.
Not to the point of breaking their economy. And yes, China's court rules that employers can't fire employees due to AI, which is something we do often here in USA to a fault. Meanwhile, USA has started to use AI to look through footage of people to issue arrests and tickets. Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) audit did reveal a 32.3% false-positive rate specifically for stolen-vehicle alerts. Yet, we still use AI with that many false positives? AI will fail because it doesn't work well enough.
they cannot break an particulary contract they signed with a particular employee is not some large rule about firing employee due to AI, the precendant set here is thet cannot use simple LLM able to do what a worker could to use the force majeur-catasthropic unpredicted event close those contract often have.
and China use AI to score citizen and give tickets of course, using AI versus worker looking at picture of cars from photo radar is a small distinction. They are big on facial recognition, license plater reader with LLM analytics of them. I do not think it is the issuing of arrest and ticket part... that most people fear, if the plate is only read when you go to fast instead of paying a cop $60 an hour to look at the pictures, people would not necessarily mind, it is reading plates info outside the context of giving a ticket to its owner that start to be a big of an issue, would they read, look in a encrypted way if it match an open warrant and that info get deleted right away if not... that also be something else.
