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Let's add as well "SpaceX’s Terafab will rely on natural gas power plants, not Tesla solar panels" to the mix :o(
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/spacexs-terafab-will-rely-...
Also an important part that keeps getting left out for some reason: they're doing so illegally. They are running unpermitted turbines. They claimed the turbines were off and journalists had to use thermal cameras mounted on drones to prove that they are indeed running. Then a non-profit had to sue them to get them to agree to turn off the turbines by 2027...
That's how bad our system is at giving any consequences to white collar crime.
and they (and many other AI data centers) run on some of the environmental/health hazard worst kinds of gas turbines available (i.e. cheap portable ones)
A well build gas power plane can be one of the cleanest fossile fuel power plants with neither huge issues of air nor sound pollution (compared to other fossile fuel, it still isn't perfect by far)
Same btw. for data center cooling, my office was for 3 years above a data center of a super computer in the mittle of a city and there where no sound issues at all (through yes it was a special case in many ways).
I mean yes, it costs more and many well established companies for high quality gas turbines are booked out.
Still using the kind of gas turbines which can bring back literal acid rain shouldn't be an option at all.
Lets also not speak about the environmental/health damage the production of the natural gas through fracking does.
Which bring us to a common nonsense argument, people going on and on about hoe economically expensive/harmful climate protection is, but totally missing that many oft he circumvented laws are not for climate protection but are for environmental protection for the sake of humans health.
To make thinks worse most of this data centers seems to be more about making money, then being in any way relevant for winning any AI race...
No, there are extreme consequences only when toes are stepped on. For example SBF... If it was run by Musk or Trump you can be sure there would be no sentence. I'm not arguing what SBF did isn't a crime. I'm saying if that deserves 20 years, then everything else should also be equally punished.
White collar crime is the only crime that should be eligible for the death penalty.
Don't understand why. AI training can be run during the sunny days. Could be a good PR opportunity for Musk, I'm surprised he doesn't take it.
Especially if he buys from his own company.
When you spend many billions buying GPUs, you want to maximize utilization, and not turn them off during the night.
It’s an industrial supply bottleneck and rollout timeline incompatibility rather than a Dr Doom Evil Genius Complex that prevents everyone from deploying solar. The race dynamics make the discount rate on GPU deployments very high.
Solar is preferable when you have a ton of unproductive land and longer timelines to set it up - it’s certainly going to be cheaper than gas when everyone goes sets up NG plants as option 1 for new energy capacity.
The other confound is that China is the primary supplier of battery and solar tech, I’m sure that supply chain risk becomes part of the calculus when setting up so much infrastructure.
For scale, the current DC is about 8k acres, and the solar to run 7.6GW is almost 40k acres.
The reasons are:
- Running billions of dollars worth of GPUs only 30-50% of the time insanely wasteful. Everyone else is running them at 99% duty cycle or close to it.
- Solar is big and generally has to be built far from where the data centres are. Transmission is already a bottleneck in many states. Adding tens of gigawatts requires non-trivial large scale infrastructure investment by… the utility companies, not SpaceX. Not to mention regulatory hurdles, etc.
- Battery production is already mostly maxed out, so obtaining tens of gigawatt hours of capacity on short notice is a decent percentage of global production.
Gas and other fossil fuel power plants can be deployed adjacent to the data centres for effectively zero transmission loss and no long powerlines that upset the NIMBY types.
They can work 24/7 and are largely available right now, but as others have pointed out the turbine blades are a limiting factor with these too.
Idk. about any specific data center but many of this data centers aren't for AI training / making advancements on the AI race. They have sufficient resources for that already AFIK.
They are to run AI, so that the 100th app can force an AI agent down your throat weather your want or not /s. (Or in more optimistic words, so that the AI adoption can spread as fast as their is demand.)
Some thoughts:
* you can run data centres on grid electricity, which can come from mostly-renewable sources (in short, you need gas mainly as as an occasional backup).
* running things off-grid is dumb, and they’re only doing it because they’re desperate to get their data centres up and running yesterday so that they’re the ones who get to the singularity first (or some approximation thereof).
* the US electricity grid is f**d, mostly for the same reasons you can’t build any linear infrastructure in the United States - too many bodies hold veto powers and use any such infrastructure as an extortion opportunity.
* The spike in gas-powered generation for data centres is essentially a US phenomenon. Globally, the vast majority of new electricity supply is coming from renewables.
* in a sane world, Amazon and new large-scale data centre providers would face punitive carbon charges to incentivise them to switch to mostly renewables as soon as possible.
Gas is ridiculously cheap in the US while it's often the most expensive source of electricity in the rest of the world.
We're currently seeing a bifurcation where Asia bets on anything but oil and gas while the US goes in the opposite direction. Note that anything but oil and gas includes coal, so this isn't about the environment.
> you can run data centres on grid electricity
The reason they're not doing that is because grid providers can't grow their supply fast enough to support new AI data centres.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
256 comments, 8 hours ago
At least these sites (its more than Amazon) are being built near the energy source they will consume. Straight out of the ground into a turbine and then into the electron spinners.
Also there's not a lot of anything where these sites are located (Near El Paso). The 4-5 Road Runners who live around there will probably appreciate the change.
West Texas is basically Mad Max 2.
No one cares about West Texas, it's about the 33 million tons of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and warming the world.
Reminder that the USA are the country that historically burned the most fossil fuels, the world's largest extractor of oil, the only country trying to do a 180 on coal power.
Half of the world has experienced unprecedented heatwaves that will become the norm in 2050.
Stop burning fossil fuels.
Don't these things get more efficient as they scale up? One big plant is probably better than 30 small ones.
A better question is why a company is allowed to effectively lie using fraudulent false advertising in its marketing and brand image about being environmentally conscious and become the largest polluter in the country?
Is Amazon too broke to buy the necessary land to build out wind/solar/battery? I thought a company that name sponsored “Climate Pledge Arena” could afford to pay a little bit extra to care about the climate.
A wind/solar/battery solution is not even really much more expensive than gas power and it’s far less dependent on fluctuating fuel prices.
If I understand correctly, for speed of deployment they're building a less-efficient simple-cycle plant (instead of the typical combined-cycle). Even though it's larger, the efficiency is worse than a typical natural gas plant.
efficient in money, nothing is said about other metrics
it's quite possible to have more product made, thus more pollution (or less materials consumed, thus less)
but concentration definitely will rise
A bigger unit is generally more efficient, but this is a single plant with a bunch of units, and I don't know that the individual units are any bigger than they would be elsewhere.
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/direct-...
Solar dc data centers are marginally cheaper. However right now the incentives are on buliding data centers (including power sources) the fastest. Despite this i would bet that you could build solar and batteries as fast as (or even faster) as building gas power plants, but the current governmend really likes to see fossils and setting the planet on fire.
Permitted maximum of 10 grams(2 nickels) of CO2 per hour for every person in the US. 33 million tons * 2000 ton/pound * 454 g/pound / 365 days in a year / 24 hours in a day / 342.6M people in us = 9.984 grams
It's important to distinguish the toxic SOX/NOX emissions from CO2 which is not toxic but is a greenhouse gas. These two categories and materially different and conflating them is very risky. For example if this were to replace an equivalently sized coal plant it would be a net improvement
Carbon tax would shift the economics in favor of renewables.
Carbon tax is the only way, you need to pay for picking up the garbage from the road or the air, the cost to clean op pollution and trash needs to be accounted for.
A carbon tax would have been a fantastic solution in the 1990s
It is too late now. There are no pare to optimal solutions left
I don’t think it would - tokens are so profitable and the race dynamics make the deployment timelines for most renewables untenable.
Throughput for solar projects is very high and increasing, latency is unfortunately also very high.
Someone’s gotta stop this who idk - that’s the problem
At this point, there are enough commenters in both threads to justify a merger.
It sounds... pretty good? It's not going to put pressure to the existing grid. Nor it will use freshwater. Near to the data centers themselves so the waste from power transmission is minimalized.
These lucky Texans get to enjoy all this AI data center natural gas powerplant pollution.
Except for that largest polluter in the country part. Our children and their children’s children and so on will curse our generation for what we did to them.
Finally, a structure worthy of its namesake.
These jet engine gas turbines create air pollution in the forms of formaldehyde and NOx and noise pollution.
> That’s in sharp contrast to Amazon’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by 2040...
Liars
Alternatives exist but they aren't free...
https://www.aga.org/decarbonizing-through-carbon-capture/
https://www.energyindepth.org/study-finds-carbon-capture-and...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277265682...
TIL mentioning a viable technology that would reduce emissions here but delay a forced transition to renewables is an instant downvote.
Viable?
Currently the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) project on the planet has failed to meet it's goals. Had it actually met the design goals it would be part of an LNG power source that manages to reclaim only 80% of the CO2 it releases.
That's not net zero, it falls short, and that's a good attempt but hardly viable.
The desired goal is to eliminate further emissions and also go further and claw back some of those gigatonnes of previously sequestered CO2 released by humans over the past century.
* A climate solution or distraction? - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-11-18/chevron-gorgon-fails-...
* ‘A shocking failure’: Chevron criticised for missing carbon capture target - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/20/a-shocki...
We have viable green technologies for power generation. We just don't penalize the polluters properly.
Carbon capture gets downvotes because it’s not working anywhere at scale. The fossil fuel industry loves it because it’s saying they get paid now and maybe someone else gets paid later, and their industry doesn’t have profits cut, but anyone planning to continue living on earth would prefer we stop polluting now because that is proven to actually work at scale.
> 7.65 gigawatt gas power plant
This is another level of insanity, right there.
Second largest hydrocarbon power generator in the world. Unreal.
"Shareholder Value Pledge Arena"
I like this for the clarity. No more wishy-washy Is Amazon Evil?
It's just Amazon ~ Fuck Yeah We're Evil