Leon Lang's Shortform

Leon Lang

This is a special post for quick takes by Leon Lang. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

New Bloomberg article on data center buildouts pitched to the US government by OpenAI. Quotes:

- “the startup shared a document with government officials outlining the economic and national security benefits of building 5-gigawatt data centers in various US states, based on an analysis the company engaged with outside experts on. To put that in context, 5 gigawatts is roughly the equivalent of five nuclear reactors, or enough to power almost 3 million homes.”
- “Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy Corp., said he has heard that Altman is talking about building 5 to 7 data centers that are each 5 gigawatts. “
- “John Ketchum, CEO of NextEra Energy Inc., said the clean-energy giant had received requests from some tech companies to find sites that can support 5 GW of demand, without naming any specific firms.”

Compare with the prediction by Leopold Aschenbrenner in situational awareness:

- "The trillion-dollar cluster—+4 OOMs from the GPT-4 cluster, the ~2030 training cluster on the current trend—will be a truly extraordinary effort. The 100GW of power it’ll require is equivalent to >20% of US electricity production"

From $4 billion for a 150 megawatts cluster, I get 37 gigawatts for a $1 trillion cluster, or seven 5-gigawatts datacenters (if they solve geographically distributed training). Future GPUs will consume more power per GPU (though a transition to liquid cooling seems likely), but the corresponding fraction of the datacenter might also cost more. This is only a training system (other datacenters will be built for inference), and there is more than one player in this game, so the 100 gigawatts figure seems reasonable for this scenario.

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