this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
197 points (99.0% liked)

World News

48408 readers
2046 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TheBeege@lemmy.world -2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

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

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.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago

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 m^2^ 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.