“if run at full strength for a year, Colossus would use as much electricity as 200,000 American homes”
“When fully operational, Musk has written on X, this facility and two other xAI data centers nearby will require nearly two gigawatts of power. Annually, those facilities could consume roughly twice as much electricity as the city of Seattle”
““These are the largest single points of consumption of electricity in history,” Jesse Jenkins, a climate modeler at Princeton, told me”
“According to Siddharth Singh, an energy-investment analyst at the International Energy Agency, by 2030, U.S. data centers will consume more electricity than all of the country’s heavy industries—more than the cement, steel, chemical, car, and other industrial facilities put together”
“the IEA estimates that data-center emissions could more than double by 2030—becoming one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases in the world”
“A data center is a planet of contradictions: heat without motion, shelter without bodies, light without sky”
“records from the Memphis water utility, for instance, show that the address for Colossus used more than 11 million gallons in September alone, as much as 150 homes use in an entire year”
“When a data center’s cooling equipment malfunctions, spiraling heat combined with humid air has yielded that rarest of meteorological events: indoor rain”
“Loudoun County has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, with 199 already operating and another 30 or so on the way. According to one report, 13 percent of global data-center capacity is squeezed into the county’s 520 square miles”
“OpenAI has proposed that the U.S. establish “AI Economic Zones”: little Loudouns everywhere”
“So many data centers are under construction just north of Dulles International Airport that hills of freshly dug dirt loom over roads and orange dust tints the air. Should Musk successfully colonize Mars, the early stages of terraforming might look like this”
“The architect of this labyrinth is Buddy Rizer, Loudoun’s longtime executive director of economic development. Rizer has courted data centers with regulatory and state tax incentives, and when we met in his office, he told me that since 2009, at least one has been under construction at any given time. Data centers are typically operated by only a few dozen staff members, but building them has produced a steady source of employment. They also provide nearly 40 percent of the county’s budget, helping to pay for police, schools, and parks for a population that has grown steadily since 2010”
“Within a 1.5-mile radius of us, Rizer said, were 12 substations: small jungles of metal poles and wiring that convert high-voltage electricity into a form you’d use to charge your iPhone or, in this case, run a data center. All around us were towering utility poles strung with high-voltage transmission lines that carry raw electricity from power plants to those substations; they hang over Loudoun like a canopy, or a cobweb. Follow any one cable far enough, and you’re likely to reach a data center”
“if AI doesn’t turn out to be as transformative a technology as experts predict, swaths of data centers could be left unused or unfinished—ruins from a future that never came to pass”
“Power generated at Three Mile Island will help offset the energy used by data centers in Virginia and Illinois; Microsoft says it purchases enough clean energy to match all of its electricity consumption, as do Google, Amazon, and Meta. These companies are also investing in hydropower, geothermal plants, and solar panels; Google is exploring building a data center in space, to enable cloud-free access to the sun”
“Still, tech firms insist that nuclear and other clean technologies cannot be deployed quickly enough to meet their needs. President Trump has signed an executive order to accelerate permitting for natural-gas and coal-fired plants to support data centers”
“Yet China’s energy advantage in the AI race comes from nuclear reactors and solar panels, not coal and oil; the country is building nearly two-thirds of the world’s new solar and wind capacity”