I don't believe that Stargate is "yesterday's data center". It's being built in multiple phases and Oracle has access to Nvidia's roadmap. They know 200 kW/rack is coming. The newer phases could easily be built out to support Rubin and Feynman.
With respect to consumption, it’s pretty efficient vs older traditional servers, though I know workloads like that aren’t completely fungible. Nonetheless it bears keeping in mind that a single GB200 NVL72 rack provides 1.4 ExaFLOPS of AI compute (at FP4 precision, ideal circumstances, but this is envelope math all around). So it’s power efficient, for what it is.
Oh, I have no doubt it is functionally efficient. I'm just amazed given the system deployments I've been party to, and the tiny amount of per rack energy usage comparatively speaking given the functionality of those systems.
Like, what in the good god damn are we using all this energy for?
You left out overthrowing governments with customized targeted propaganda, jamming citizen discussion with noise, artificially creating and nourishing contrarian cells in democratic societies. The machines will now be programming people.
In theory the water stays clean and can be reused. But I assume these cheapskates will go for evaporative cooling everytime? Then yeah, we need laws against that.
I guess when you're dissipating upwards of a gigawatt of power at a single site boiling water starts to look attractive. It's a pretty impressive curveball; I definitely would never have predicted "an evil corporation boils off all the local drinking water" to be a legitimate concern. I'm pretty sure that's too absurd a plot point for even a children's movie.
I keep hearing people claiming that water is just as much as issue as energy for operating these DCs, but that just doesn't make any sense to me. However, I haven't had to step inside a DC for almost two decades.
Continuously dissipating 1 gigawatt of energy by boiling room temperature water would require approximately 1.38 million liters of water per hour.
Seems like the environmentally responsible thing to do be to build the datacenter near the coast and use the waste heat to desalinate water. Or at least dissipate the heat into the ocean rather than boiling off an inland freshwater supply.
Setting aside a small patch of ocean for the task seems like a much better plan than the current practice. Provided you dump it in a place with a decent current any adversely affected area should be exceedingly small.
Keep in mind that the sun is constantly dumping energy on us. Absorption averaged across the entire earth is ~200 W/m^2. Assuming I didn't misplace some zeros somewhere then a gigawatt corresponds to ~5 km^2 of ocean surface. That's the daily flux. Penetration falls off exponentially so 75% of that only ever makes it ~10 m down.
I think the takeaway here is the utterly incomprehensible scale of the ocean.
This idea is probably more worth it in middle eastern countries given that 90% of their water comes from Desalination Plants. But given the recent war within region, I don't really expect Datacenters to be built within the region for quite a long time.
Yeah because it's cheaper they go evaporative. That's an easy fix by just making it more expensive.
People talk about the water usage like it's an intrinsic feature of datacenters; it's not. You just make it more expensive so they are forced to conserve. But you wait till you have to so you don't push them to build elsewhere.
Some of the reason for the high density is that you need devices physically close to each other to share such bandwidth. It’s not because we’re limited by the physical building space, because we can construct buildings all day long. Sending bits around at ultra high speed is hard and you need to keep all of the devices physically close to avoid having your interconnect costs explode.
Interestingly the realm in which I have domain experience has similar constraints, but based primarily on physical transport latency and less on bandwidth. There has been a move in some spaces towards hyper-dense deployments, but it’s a very small amount of the total compute capacity due to other limitations.
Still, the world I’m used to operating in is typically 5-10 kVA/rack.
So what's the theory that goes with this about why cnbc are reporting that openai are walking because they want newer nvidia hardware? CNBC are clueleess? People at openai are lying to cnbc? cnbc are fabricating stories while drunk?
There has to be some theory to explain the story to be consistent with this comment.
I agree with you more than I agree with the parent comment.
To use the hit HBO TV show silicon valley analogy, it is far more likely that "the bear is sticky with honey" will happen at Oracle than at Open AI. Some kind of game of telephone gone wrong at some point and now the people responsible at Oracle must double down in order to kick the can to the next quarter and not appear clueless.
Statutory disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Open AI or Oracle and have no insider information. All of this is mere conjecture and has no basis in reality.
