As the Trump administration's “big, beautiful bill” eliminates many clean-energy incentives in the U.S., China continues huge investments in wind and solar power, reportedly accounting for 74 percent of all projects now under construction worldwide.
So… I considered trying to start an energy-sustainable data center…
The math doesn’t check out. One square meter of earth gets about 1,000 watts from sunlight. Our current solar panels only run at 20% efficiency at best. Servers I looked at average 500 watts… and we usually put a bunch of servers stacked up in a single rack, which you can only fit one of in one square meter.
As AI grows, it’s only gonna get worse. We need nuclear or geothermal or hell, fusion if we can make it not 50 years away.
But it explains why Amazon and such are looking into smaller scale nuclear. Let’s see how that goes I guess…
Edit: I’m not saying solar is a bad idea. We just need more energy production of many sorts
The thing is we can gather that solar energy from other locations too. We can harvest wind and hydro, which are just solar power in a different form. We can gather solar energy that’s deposited off of our site in this way.
You’re assuming that the world is covered in server racks. I don’t expect anything like that, even with significant increases in datacenter construction.
Let’s assume 1kw per person. 10 billion people at peak population some time hence. So about 150 billion m2 to provide 1kw per person 24/7. The earth’s surface area is 510.1 trillion m², of which about 1/3 is land. So we’re probably just fine on renewables.
Your numbers are old. If you are building today with anyone ad much as mentioning AI, you might as well consider 100kW/rack as ”normal”. An off-the-shelf CPU today runs at 500W, and you usually have two of them per server, along with memory, storage and networking. With old school 1U pizza boxes, that’s basically 100kW/rack. If you start adding GPUs, just double or quadruple power density right off the bat. Of course, assume everything is direct liquid cooled.
So… I considered trying to start an energy-sustainable data center…
The math doesn’t check out. One square meter of earth gets about 1,000 watts from sunlight. Our current solar panels only run at 20% efficiency at best. Servers I looked at average 500 watts… and we usually put a bunch of servers stacked up in a single rack, which you can only fit one of in one square meter.
As AI grows, it’s only gonna get worse. We need nuclear or geothermal or hell, fusion if we can make it not 50 years away.
But it explains why Amazon and such are looking into smaller scale nuclear. Let’s see how that goes I guess…
Edit: I’m not saying solar is a bad idea. We just need more energy production of many sorts
The thing is we can gather that solar energy from other locations too. We can harvest wind and hydro, which are just solar power in a different form. We can gather solar energy that’s deposited off of our site in this way.
You’re assuming that the world is covered in server racks. I don’t expect anything like that, even with significant increases in datacenter construction.
Let’s assume 1kw per person. 10 billion people at peak population some time hence. So about 150 billion m2 to provide 1kw per person 24/7. The earth’s surface area is 510.1 trillion m², of which about 1/3 is land. So we’re probably just fine on renewables.
Your numbers are old. If you are building today with anyone ad much as mentioning AI, you might as well consider 100kW/rack as ”normal”. An off-the-shelf CPU today runs at 500W, and you usually have two of them per server, along with memory, storage and networking. With old school 1U pizza boxes, that’s basically 100kW/rack. If you start adding GPUs, just double or quadruple power density right off the bat. Of course, assume everything is direct liquid cooled.