the TLDR is that the current historic peak supply of the texas grid is around 100gw. The queue of datacenter demand is 460gw.
If the new capacity uses gas to deliver the power it will consume more gas than the USA exported last year.
So basically it will drive up costs _globally_ to a comic scale, for limited return (its already expensive to train new models, this will make it ruinously expensive to both train _and_ run)
I am not climate change activist. But spending that much energy coming from fossil sources sound like something that we really should be very critical about... Is this really the best use for energy we have?
Gets just a little tricky on one aspect;
Lots of oil sites, oil refinery plants, (heck, even landfills) just 'flare' excess Natural gas today.
Biggest reason for that, is, they don't have the infrastructure to store that excess safely (at least around here, a lot of the landfill trucks are NG powered as a way to lower their fuel costs and lower flaring, but storing too much NG in one place makes for a fun terrorism target.) Natural gas is actually -way- worse for global warming than CO2, thus the flaring process.
Not saying that's a good thing. It would be better if companies saw the growing energy demand and figured out how to economically put power generation in place, back when such projects would have been cheaper to build. Alas the cost/benefit for that has usually been on the wrong side, to the detriment of us all.
Well, the climate is part of it, but I deliberately steered clear of that, because people get funny. I do agree it seems like a frivolous waste.
the thing that people _will_ notice is that they will not be able to afford LNG (ie heating), but that will also drive up peak energy price, so summer nights will be very hot because peak generation can't kick in because all the gas is contracted out.
Then if AI actually works, more than it does now, it'll put loads of people out of work. This means that money supply dries up. This pushes up the cost of debt. Meaning that infrastructure gets _more expensive_
that and mass unemployment.
It just seems that all these clever people live in thier own little worlds, without bothering to look at how people around them will be affected.
> It just seems that all these clever people live in thier own little worlds, without bothering to look at how people around them will be affected.
I'd like to add the possibility that all these clever people did look at how people around them will be affected, and they either consider the personal gain to be worth the pain, or they think "if I don't do it, the other guy will!"
Economically speaking, each of them is behaving rationally. And since economics also tells us that locations refusing them will be left behind, we can't say no, right? And let's not even think about how much money these people are pumping into politics... IMO the obvious conclusion is that our economic system is fundamentally broken, because it affords far too much power to individuals.
As a thought experiment, consider that comparable mountains of money would have been available to massively increase the housing supply while making positive RoI, but it didn't happen because these people wouldn't have made enough money.