Lots of people were just yelling the grid can’t handle more load like for checking cars while Google adds a countries worth of power use with AI.
Comment on Google and Microsoft consume more power than some countries
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t see what’s surprising here. They provide services for users globally. Not that it’s justified, it’s just kind of weird that people think global scale computing is light on electricity, apparently
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Jako301@feddit.de 2 months ago
Google builds entire datacenters with their own transformers and power lines, if not their own powerplants. You plug these datacenters directly into the high voltage networks that don’t have big capacity problems.
The low voltage grids in residential areas on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
The low voltage grids in
residential areassuburbs on the other hand were build as cheap as possible, so increasing the load by 20% is already too much for most of them.
David_Eight@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Don’t forget to set you AC to 80 because the grid can’t handle the load lol. That’s exactly why this info is important, ecological solutions are somehow always trusted on individuals when the vast majority of the issue lies with corporations.
iopq@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Those corporations are serving users, they wouldn’t need all that power if billions weren’t using their services
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
lol yeah whatever. keep shilling.
David_Eight@lemmy.world 2 months ago
And I’m using my AC, we’re both using power. How many times has the government told one of these companies to use less power because the grid can’t handle the strain their servers put on it?
And it’s not like these companies aren’t herding people toward these cloud services. A few weeks ago my Google Cloud storage was maxed out so I wanted to delete some photos/videos off their cloud while keeping them on my phone. Legit couldn’t figure out how to do that and just ended up deleting stuff permanently.
x1gma@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s not surprising per se, but it’s something that people should be more aware of. And a lot of this consumption is not providing global services (like the Google search or workspace suite) but the whole AI hype.
I didn’t find numbers for Google or Microsoft specifically, but training ChatGPT 4 consumed 50 GWh on its own. The daily estimates for queries are estimated between 1-5 GWh.
Given that the extrapolation is an overestimate and calculating the actual consumption is pretty much impossible, it’s still probably a lot of energy wasted for a product that people do not want (e.g. Google AI “search”, Bing and Copilot being stuffed into everything).
Womble@lemmy.world 2 months ago
To put a bit of context on those, 50GWh is a medium sized power station running for 2 days. To create something that is being used around 10 million times a day all over the world.
At 10 million queries per day that puts the usage per query at 100-500 Wh, about the amount of energy used by leaving an old incandecent lightbulb on for an hour, or playing a demanding video game for about 20 minutes.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
They only do that because they project it to be profitable, i.e. they project demand for it.
It’s also asinine to claim that people don’t want it just because you don’t.
fatalicus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The thing here also is that I can’t see that they have taken into account that they deliver data center services globally.
So say that my company have 100 VMs in azure. That energy usage should count for our company and country, and not Microsoft.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 months ago
It sounds scary, and that's all that's needed to get clicks.
Shdwdrgn@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Google originally made a name for themselves by building a global search engine on low cost, low powered desktop machines running in parallel, so it’s surprising because they have gone from high-efficiency to power hogs.
iopq@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Who said they are not efficient? They just serve buildings of users. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t figure out how to do it more efficiently than Bing PER REQUEST. They have PhDs sitting around thinking how to lower power consumption by 1%
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Not surprising at all. Power hogging is the whole point of capitalism. It’s just literally electric power in this case.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Showers worldwide use more water than …
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
All of that AI crap they keep pushing certainly doesn’t help the energy consumption though.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For sure