Jesus
The demand from all the poorer countries with large populations is only going to go up as their kids grow up with tech.
Though, maybe Midjourney or other niche AI companies could buy it for the right price I guess.
In theory you could write games with just those but aside from the amount of work needed I'm not sure if the performance would be good enough, the specialized texture samplers etc can be faster than general purpose compute shaders.
Also, for cloud gaming you want very low latency, so few GPUs all over the world in local POPs, not a lot of GPUs in few large data centers.
Near both the Casadia fault that's produced magnitude 9 earthquakes and a chain of active volcanoes. Both of which are statistically likely. I do wonder what contingency plans Amazon (and Microsoft) have in the event of a megathrust earthquake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_subduction_zone#Forec...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Rainier#Modern_activity_...
If you're speaking metaphorically, the mega thrust would be some cataclysmic world event like China invading Taiwan. In which case they won't need to earn natural gas to power or waste fresh water to cool...
It's seems a little dishonest to not include that 'statistically likely' is on a geological time scale.
Sad, but expected.
it will be if the coal price drops far enough
We could always revisit this decision once clean power is actually available.
Sentences like this never ceases to amaze me. All of this juice to attempt to match what a single human brain can do with its relatively low resource requirements.
ftfy
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/gett...
Here’s a recent article from AWS about using closed-loop systems for their AI data centers: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-liquid-cooling-data...
It's more economical to run chips hotter but at the end of the day you'll still have heat that needs dissipating and it's hard if not impossible to beat evaporative cooling in terms of cost.
Can't they find brownfield sites instead of fields
Indiana is about 23 million acres.
It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances.
That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently.
In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
Farming is extremely money and labor intensive and there’s a lot of upfront investment with a lot of long-tail return, and it’s not “sexy” the way (for example) AI is, so there’s not a bottomless pit of cash to shovel into the furnace for a quick buck turnaround.
Independent farmers tend to seriously rely on good weather and a lot of advantageous tax treatment.
Of course massive agri-business would very much love to continue to fill more and more of the void left by the shrinking independent farming population. That has its own problems.
So it does seem like some of the people making these decisions just like the idea of taking farmland out of production for some reason. Maybe they just don't like farmers or modern farming methods. If that's their motive, they may not realize how tiny an effect they're having on the total, because most non-farmers don't really understand how much land is out there.
It's like the people who say Bill Gates is trying to control the food supply because he owns something like 270,000 acres of farmland. Even that just isn't that much, not enough for him to control anything larger than the horseradish market.
You mean precisely like xAI did in Memphis? Build on the site of an abandoned factory—a historically disadvantaged, low-income industrial zone?
I couldn't imagine anyone having anything negative to say about that.
pseudolus•4h ago