Interesting—source pls? The price of energy is one of the most important things on my list so I’m especially keen to hear more evidence for and against my projected 10x drop.
As jacopo pointed out the Simon–Ehrlich wager is a key argument. As far as solar costs go, the cost of actual solar cells fell a lot more in the last years then installation costs.
When it comes to solar cells for training neural nets, it’s worth noting that those don’t need to be stationed on earth.
At 10$/kg or less for transporting material to space with Starship (and it’s successors) it’s possible that it makes more sense to have the data center in space where it gets exposure to the sun 24⁄7 and there’s no sky that blocks sunlight.
For earth based datacenters, if energy is the limiting factor and a lot of the energy comes from solar, it’s possible to do all the training for neural nets in the summer where there’s plenty of solar energy and not train your models on days where solar cells and wind farms produce little energy.
Is refrigeration a big part of data centers energy costs ? This would mean the best places for solar energy are also the worst places for data centers...
I’ve thought a bit about this, but haven’t done any calculations. My guess is that it would be overall cheaper to have datacenters in sunny regions than to try to get solar panels in cold regions. Your refrigeration (and heat management more generally) electricity bill will be higher, but not that much higher, but your electricity costs will be much lower.
If refrigeration becomes a major part of the energy cost it’s worth noting that there’s thinking about putting data centers under water where they can be cooled more easily. At the moment that’s not viable but it might be in 2040.
True but putting them in Northern part of the world may also be a good idea. Right now looking for example at Google’s data centers map there seems to be a very small trend toward northern locations (at least in Europe), but it may just be a flux due to local financial incentives being more favorable in some countries.
I think he might be referring to the Simon–Ehrlich wager. And indeed there have been other similar claims in the past, more often proven wrong than correct.
Interesting—source pls? The price of energy is one of the most important things on my list so I’m especially keen to hear more evidence for and against my projected 10x drop.
As jacopo pointed out the Simon–Ehrlich wager is a key argument. As far as solar costs go, the cost of actual solar cells fell a lot more in the last years then installation costs.
When it comes to solar cells for training neural nets, it’s worth noting that those don’t need to be stationed on earth.
At 10$/kg or less for transporting material to space with Starship (and it’s successors) it’s possible that it makes more sense to have the data center in space where it gets exposure to the sun 24⁄7 and there’s no sky that blocks sunlight.
For earth based datacenters, if energy is the limiting factor and a lot of the energy comes from solar, it’s possible to do all the training for neural nets in the summer where there’s plenty of solar energy and not train your models on days where solar cells and wind farms produce little energy.
Is refrigeration a big part of data centers energy costs ? This would mean the best places for solar energy are also the worst places for data centers...
I’ve thought a bit about this, but haven’t done any calculations. My guess is that it would be overall cheaper to have datacenters in sunny regions than to try to get solar panels in cold regions. Your refrigeration (and heat management more generally) electricity bill will be higher, but not that much higher, but your electricity costs will be much lower.
If refrigeration becomes a major part of the energy cost it’s worth noting that there’s thinking about putting data centers under water where they can be cooled more easily. At the moment that’s not viable but it might be in 2040.
True but putting them in Northern part of the world may also be a good idea. Right now looking for example at Google’s data centers map there seems to be a very small trend toward northern locations (at least in Europe), but it may just be a flux due to local financial incentives being more favorable in some countries.
Google seems to have one datacenter in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Finnland and two in the Netherlands.
Those seem to be countries that currently have cheap industrial electricity: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1046605/industry-electricity-prices-european-union-country/
I think he might be referring to the Simon–Ehrlich wager. And indeed there have been other similar claims in the past, more often proven wrong than correct.