Comment on Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors

• FooBarrington@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.

  Sorry, but that’s wrong. You’ll run it as much as is profitable. If electricity cost goes up, there is a point where you’ll stop running it, since it becomes too expensive. Even more so considering that AI models don’t have a set goal to reach - you train them as long as you want and can, but training a little bit extra will have diminishing returns after a while.

  That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.

  Not really, the limiting factors in AI training are mostly supply of cards. The cards already in use will stay in use until they fail, they won’t be replaced with newer cards the second they get released.

  This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.

  This is comparing apples and oranges, since tire factories:

  • have long-term planning and production goals to reach

  • have employees who must be planned

  • have resource input costs that are higher than electricity

  Of course you want the highest utilisation that you can economically reach, but a better comparison would be crypto mining - which also has expensive equipment that has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running, and yet they stop mining when electricity is too expensive.

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