does anybody have really high quality, recent (as in, from this year) numbers on electricity consumption of AI datacenters? why is this shit so hard to find
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@xan I can't speak for power consumption of datacenters, but I Know @mttaggart did some digging into the power cost to train an AI model, and one estimate was 50KW.
Oh yeah, I watched this documentary video once about datacenter noise, and its health effects, and there was very brief blurb on an estimate for the power consumption of the xAI/Grok datacenter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo
You'll want to watch the third section specifically, starting at ~4:08 to hear power specs for the Colossus datacenter.
@mttaggart @xan I was off by an order of magnitude. whoops.
@da_667 @xan Just to add that the 50 GWh number was for training GPT-4. These days, ongoing inference at the token rates used by coding assistants and similar tools means ongoing usage eclipses training in short order. TL;DR: it is very bad, but how bad depends on the source of the energy and how the waste heat is handled.
