How to power the AIs. It's a crazy new world.

Casey Handmer's Blog, How to Feed the AIs, March 12, 2024.

AIs use a LOT of power. Producing that power is one thing. Getting it to the AIs is another.

The challenge with grid development is that it’s a permitting and construction nightmare, and like many things in the West, has gotten extremely expensive and time consuming to execute. But the datacenters need power much sooner than conventional development can build new power plants and transmission lines – even if permitting, eminent domain, technology, and construction costs were a solved problem!

It is time to lift the constraint that a new data center must be attached to the grid. Instead, we can provide most of the power locally using “beyond the grid” renewable energy generation, backed up by batteries for energy storage overnight.

For example:

A 1 GW data center (containing roughly a million H100s!) would have a substantial footprint of 20,000 acres, almost all of that solar panels. The batteries for storage and data center itself would occupy only a few of those acres. This is in some sense analogous to a relatively compact city surrounded by extensive farmland to produce its food.

Of course future data centers will use more advanced and productive computers but their power consumption and heat generation will remain much the same. Radically more efficient panels, batteries, and computers will only increase the revenue per unit land used for this purpose.

The development cost of a 1 GW data center would be around $60b including the solar+battery power plant, and importantly the lead time and permitting complexity for each of the components: solar array, batteries, structures, racks, internet connection, and servers is about the same. This is in direct contrast to conventional on-grid power supply, whose capacity is nearly exhausted already.

Is this going to pave the Earth with solar?

My startup Terraform Industries looks to apply solar to produce synthetic fuel, consuming substantial amounts of land (though less than agriculture) in the process. Something like 2 billion acres, or 7% of Earth’s land surface area, would be sufficient to provide every man, woman, and child on Earth with US levels of oil and gas abundance and commensurate prosperity. It’s possible to imagine a future where people consume even more than that – widespread personal supersonic transport, for example – but ongoing conversion of land use away from intensive industrial agriculture toward inherently more productive solar synthetics is a clear net win for the environment.

Is this the case for solar AGI? It’s currently hard to imagine Nvidia and friends producing 100 billion or more H100s, but it’s also hard to imagine our collective demand for artificial intelligence will saturate. If we’re spending $60b on a 20,000 acre solar powered data center development, that’s about $3m/acre. Even if the land acquisition budget is only 3% of the budget at $100,000/acre, this is still substantially higher than essentially all land outside of major cities, including prime agricultural land. Is AI a solar panel maximizer, rather than a paperclip maximizer?

Will AIs prefer to live in space instead of on the Earth?

There's much more at the link, like this crazy-ass final paragraph:

It seems that AGI will create an irresistibly strong economic forcing function to pave the entire world with solar panels – including the oceans. We should probably think about how we want this to play out. At current rates of progress, we have about 20 years before paving is complete.