Dr. Rob Davies, a physics professor at Utah State
University, prepared the analysis that estimates
the energy footprint of the proposed data center
is comparable to 40,000 Walmart Supercenters.
23 atomic bombs per day does not really tell me much. Both boxer's punch and a 9mm bullet have about 450 J of energy, but the effects are very different.
A better comparison would be ~550000 average US houses... or a single medium-sized aluminum smelter factory.
Thats why they gave the measurement in watts (which is power) and not joules (which is energy). The answer is that even if the fist and the bullet transfer equivalent amounts of energy the bullet has significantly higher instantaneous power because the energy is transferred over a shorter period of time.
AI datacenters are effectively boilers that burn gas, heat the atmosphere and boil rivers. Remember that GPUs turn all electricity into heat. As a side effect, they also produce slop.
7 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] threadWhat is the standard "atomic bomb" unit these days?
Size = 62mi² https://kutv.com/news/local/proposed-box-elder-data-center-r...
Energy usage = 9 Gigawats (Utah uses 4 Gigawatts total) https://www.cachevalleydaily.com/news/hundreds-of-utahns-fil...
Water usage permitted = 13,000 acre-feet (26k-39k homes worth) https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/box-elder-county/mo...
23 atomic bombs per day does not really tell me much. Both boxer's punch and a 9mm bullet have about 450 J of energy, but the effects are very different.
A better comparison would be ~550000 average US houses... or a single medium-sized aluminum smelter factory.