How AI labs are solving the power problem

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power

by Symmetry • 7 months ago

167 254 7 months ago

newsletter.semianalysis.com

Symmetry2• 7 months ago

I found Boom's pivot much less confusing after this article.

leetrout• 7 months ago

For those like me that are missing context:

https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

Boom’s pivot to trying to build turbines for data centers wasn’t surprising when data center deployments started using turbines. Either their CEO saw one of the headlines or their investors forwarded it over and it became their new talking point.

What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.

Symmetry2• 7 months ago

I had been under the mistaken impression that the turbines in airplanes were more different from the turbines in power plants than they actually are.

quickthrowman• 7 months ago

What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.

My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”

torginus2• 7 months ago

What I didn't get is afair Boom doesn't build engines, aren't they using some old 50s-60s fighter jet engines?

goda90• 7 months ago

Power problem: solved

Natural Gas supply problem: worsened

Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened

protimewaster• 7 months ago

Yeah, that headline made me think "Oh good, there's some solution on the horizon that won't require absurd amounts of electricity."

Not so.

corimaith• 7 months ago

Coincidentally the USA is more than self sufficient in natural gas and is a net exporter. Drill baby drill!

twism• 7 months ago

supply is finite

imglorp2• 7 months ago

And the air quality around these plants is poor, leading to health problems for the neighbors.

This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.

I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.

https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...

lukan• 7 months ago

I assumed gas plants are pretty good in terms of air quality?

Coal plants are bad.

PunchyHamster3• 7 months ago

It can't be "criminalized" if govt and justice system is effectively actively bribed by the AI cartel because AI-related GDP "growth" is only veneer hiding the economical fuckups of the government

sokoloff• 7 months ago

specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai

Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.

If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.

What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office; maybe the workload just shrank a bit; maybe they’re worried about the economic outlook for next year…

Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use AI at all. Maybe they were more efficient before AI but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?

Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people and AI that would take other companies 8-25 people. A brand new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it or contracting with company B. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Whose job(s)?

dragonwriter• 7 months ago

specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai.

Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.

saghm2• 7 months ago

Yeah I guess I'm not the target audience for this because I assumed that "the power problem" was "massive increase in electricity costs for people despite virtually unchanged usage on their part", not "AI companies have to wait too long to be able to start using even more power than they already are":

Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.
And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...

jstummbillig• 7 months ago

I understand the instinct but if people seriously think that they are solving any problem by unplugging cell phone chargers, they are simply bad at math. Human time is easily worth more than that, even when working at minimum wage.

That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I have not done the math.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

The natural gas turbines used are relatively efficient as far as engines go. Having them on-site makes transmission losses basically negligible.

Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.

miltonlost3• 7 months ago

as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.

Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.

Natural gas engines are efficient!

Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human lives not matter?

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

estearum2• 7 months ago

I'm honestly curious whether you yourself are even aware of the disingenuousness of this argument. It's fairly impressive in its density!

1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.

2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!

3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."

4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria

einrealist2• 7 months ago

The word 'pollution' appears exactly one time in this entire thing, the word 'community' or 'communities' never.

quikoa• 7 months ago

This website appears to be very AI heavy in articles. I think it's fair to say these articles are biased because of that.

wyldfire• 7 months ago

The only way to solve problems like this IMO is to price in the externalities. Tax fossil fuels for the damage they do, in order to reveal their true cost. Then they will never look like the most affordable option, because they're not.

torginus2• 7 months ago

And imagine all this poorly located, overpriced, haphazardly thrown together and polluting infrastructure will basically get flushed down the toilet once either the AI bubble pops, or they figure out a new way of doing AI that doesn't require terawatts of power.

pingou• 7 months ago

What about renewables + battery storage? Does it take much longer to build? I can imagine getting a permit can take quite a long time, but what takes so long to set up solar panels and link them to batteries, without even having to connect them to the grid?

thunderbird120• 7 months ago

Takes much longer to build, requires a much larger up-front investment, and requires a lot more land.

The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.

memoriuaysj2• 7 months ago

land. compute what surface you need for 1 GW of solar

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

Reciprocating natural gas engines can be moved from [concrete] pad to pad and be up and running in under 24 hours. The portable turbines take longer but they’re still fast.

Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.

condensedcrab2• 7 months ago

The density required for solar is also much lower - the coordination between different land parcels and routing power and getting easements increases the time required vs. on prem gas turbines.

O5vYtytb• 7 months ago

How many batteries is that? If we're talking solar and you have say a 300MW datacenter and you need it to operate for 12 hours without sun you need at least two of the largest battery install in the world[1] at 1700MWh. That doesn't factor cloudy days.

[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...

doctorpangloss2• 7 months ago

Another POV is, if datacenters are really constrained by power, by all means, offer users a discount when their queries utilize solar. Millions of Americans drive further to save cents to fill up their tanks - you can’t say there isn’t precedent among normal people to deal with this. The better question is, is it really a constraint?

thatfrenchguy• 7 months ago

Our kids are not going to be happy we spun up more CO2 generation for this.

memoriuaysj2• 7 months ago

their uploaded minds will enjoy the infinite AI slop though

linsomniac• 7 months ago

I hear they LOVE Sanctuary Moon.

Apreche2• 7 months ago

An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.

Citation needed.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

This is coming from a group that does analysis on the semiconductor and cloud industries and provided very expensive access to their models and info. They are the citation.

Apreche2• 7 months ago

So I guess it’s not a bubble then since these companies are raking in the big revenues? Or maybe they are counting all those circular investments as revenues somehow?

dannersy2• 7 months ago

I mean, if so then they are lying through their teeth.

zozbot2344• 7 months ago

If you do the math, that's $10-$12 per watt year. There's approx 24×365.25=8766 hours in a year, so assuming that the datacenters would be running 24×7, that boils down to $1.14 to $1.37 in revenue per kWh. That's not a bad deal if power really is a major part of the expense.

jsnell2• 7 months ago

As far as I can tell, power isn't actually a major part of the expense, it's dwarfed by the capex. Just the amortization on the GPU will be an order of magnitude higher than the cost of the power to run the GPU at 100%. (Assuming a 5 year depreciation period.)

mikelitoris2• 7 months ago

“Could”, sure... and I “could” fly if I strapped a jet engine to my ass

strange_quark2• 7 months ago

Even if that’s true, that seems like a putrid number, no?

Assuming a single 1GW the data center runs 24/7 365, it’s consuming 8.76 TwH per year. Only being able to generate $10-$12B in revenue (not profit) per year while consuming as much electricity as the entire state of Hawaii (1.5M people) seems awful.

pdpi• 7 months ago

Part of what bothers me with AI energy consumption isn't just how wasteful it might be from an ecological perspective, it's how brutally inefficient it is compared to the biological "state of the art" — 2000kcal = 8,368 kJ. 8,368 kJ / 86,400 s = 96.9 W.

So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.

saagarjha• 7 months ago

That’s about the energy a laptop or two uses at full tilt.

roflmaostc• 7 months ago

try to calculate 12312312.123213 * 123123.3123123

A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.

It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.

EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.

talideon• 7 months ago

A GenAI does not, however.

sayamqazi• 7 months ago

GenAI completely fails to even get the right answer to numeric problems

FergusArgyll3• 7 months ago

You can't compare a training run that produces a file which can be run forever after to a human day

beepbooptheory2• 7 months ago

Inference itself is also very costly!

But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?

crazygringo5• 7 months ago

Is it though? When I ask an LLM research questions, it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.

Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.

Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.

If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for the same amount of work.

discreteevent2• 7 months ago

For this kind of thinking to work in practice you would need to kill the people that AI makes redundant. This is apart from the fact that right now we are at a choke point where it's much more important to generate less CO2 than it is to write scientific simulation code a little quicker (and most people are using AI for much more unnecessary stuff like marketing)

usefulcat• 7 months ago

it often answers in 20 seconds what it would take me an entire afternoon to figure out with traditional research.

In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.

LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.

exitb• 7 months ago

How so? A human needs the entire civilisation to be productive at that level. If you take a just the entire US electricity consumption and divide it by its population, you'll get a result that's an order of magnitude higher. And that's just electricity. And that's just domestic consumption, even though US Americans consume tons of foreign-made goods.

windexh8er3• 7 months ago

Beyond wasteful the linked article can't even remotely be taken seriously.

An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.

What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.

And then we get this gem...

Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.

So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.

This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.

This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.

I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.

rixed• 7 months ago

Ah! And don't get me started about how specific its energy source must be! Pure electricity, no less! Where a human brain comes attached with an engine that can power it for days on a mere ham sandwich!

redox992• 7 months ago

How much energy did evolution "spend" to get us here?

I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.

Magnets• 7 months ago

you didn't consider the 18+ years we have with almost no productivity and the extra resources required to sustain life

dkobia• 7 months ago

Interesting choice of names: "Solar Turbines" - a wholly owned Caterpillar subsidiary that designs and manufactures industrial gas turbines.

That said, it is all pretty impressive.

sameesh• 7 months ago

"xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines."

So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel. Got it.

miltonlost3• 7 months ago

And all without the proper permits! Using 35 generators when they were only allowed 15! Yay! So glad we're allowing AI companies to break law after law after law to not be able to reason logically the basic Towers of Hanoi.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...

thrance• 7 months ago

Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive. xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.

Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything else.

sam-cop-vimes• 7 months ago

I'm no fan of Musk, but you've got to admit it was a clever way to achieve the goal. SemiAnalysis don't do fanboy articles - their research is pretty in-depth. So they are stating it as they see it.

The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".

miltonlost3• 7 months ago

"Getting a permit for 15 turbines after having illegally used 35 turbines that then poisoned the air for the residences around the turbines" is a clever way to achieve the goal? I wouldn't call doing a blatant illegal action "clever", but rather sociopathic.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

Grimblewald• 7 months ago

You'd have to be a little thick yourself to think that's clever. If you think that's clever, let me recommend you sell your car for extra fuel money, chop off your legs for rapid weight loss, and perhaps abuse methamphetamine to not have to sleep, boosting productivity 3 fold. Perhaps you'd like to add robbing banks as a faster way to get your cash out.

bob10292• 7 months ago

Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.

This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.

jsnell2• 7 months ago

I mean, the claim is certainly nonsensical in the sense that this isn't something Wärtsilä just "realized". They have been in the power plant business for decades. In the oldest financials they have online (the annual report for year 2000) their power plant sales are larger than their marine engine sales.

Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists.

But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?

g8oz2• 7 months ago

They likely use multiple engines.

codingdave• 7 months ago

This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."

It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

This is a really long way of saying "We need to burn fossil fuels to make more money."

Like every other industry in the world?

I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.

roxolotl2• 7 months ago

The difference is they are new. It’s not rational but people on the whole generally are ok with the status quo of how the sausage is made largely because they don’t really think about it. But new systems being spun up provide an entry point for a discussion. Ideally that discussion can then be widened and open up an opportunity for wider scale change. Or nothing happens and it all becomes the new status quo which most don’t think about again.

TSiege2• 7 months ago

The difference is that the food industry at least feeds me and a house provides me shelter. The people in charge of building AI data centers intend to replace all labor in using my own and leave me begging for peanuts, while also making energy and many goods more expensive and ruining the environment

TSiege2• 7 months ago

FYI Fairly certain this account is a bot. Acct created in 2023 and has 36k karma

AkelaA2• 7 months ago

We need food and housing. We don't need AI.

HDThoreaun• 7 months ago

More like it’s a really long way to say the government has utterly failed at making sure electricity generation and transmission capacity keeps up with demand so datacenters have been forced to get creative with alternative ways to power themselves. These companies absolutely want to use renewable energy from the power grid but the government blew it.

teknopaul• 7 months ago

Economic * need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid.

*greed.

We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is anything but a distribution of income problem.

biddit• 7 months ago

The dialog around AI resource use is frustratingly inane, because the benefits are never discussed in the same context.

LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created:

AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x

zzzeek• 7 months ago

However, AI infrastructure cannot wait for the grid’s multiyear transmission upgrades. An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually. Getting a 400 MW datacenter online even six months earlier is worth billions. Economic need dwarfs problems like an overloaded electric grid. The industry is already searching for new solutions.

wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with that.

This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.

geetee• 7 months ago

Title should be "AI labs are raping the planet"

a1371• 7 months ago

The problem is that most of the AI labs are popping up in TX that has a uniquely isolated electrical grid. Recall how the Texas cold snap a few years ago took down the grid for days. Turns out if you make a grid based on short term profit motifs, it's not going to be flexible enough to take new demand.

It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it

symbogra• 7 months ago

Really cool in depth report, thanks for sharing. It's very interesting to see what these big datacenter deployments are actually doing. Go look at the oil price charts for the last 25 years and you'll see why it makes a ton of sense economically.

I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.

qchris• 7 months ago

I often like SemiAnalysis' work, but there's parts of this article that are shockingly under-researched and completely missing critical parts of the narrative.

Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.
Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!

The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.

[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/

[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...

mikelitoris2• 7 months ago

More appropriate word is “sly” not “clever”.

bugglebeetle• 7 months ago

It’s called “Semi” analysis for a reason. Dylan Patel is the Jim Cramer of industry reporting for this sector.

roxolotl2• 7 months ago

It’s cute they describe this as a solution to _the_ power problem. It’s a solution to _their_ power problem. We have a grid problem. This massive amount of investment would be an incredible time to do something about it. Instead we’ve got an administration hostile to modern energy solutions and an industry hostile to everyone. Really depressing to see all this money go up in smoke in such a massive short sighted rush.

josefritzishere• 7 months ago

TLDR: They're not reducing power consumption, they're just also using gas now. Buckle up for higher prices, the AI slop factory needs more power.

bespokedevelopr• 7 months ago

I previously worked directly for some of the power generation manufacturers listed in the article and later on the grid/power transmission side.

My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.

I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.

Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.

On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.

As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.

trhway2• 7 months ago

so we had some onsite generation moves from the lower end - residential solar, etc - and now we have it from the higher end - fossil fuel generation at datacenters. If that creates high efficiency generators then that may drive "onsite" further into the mid-segment. That may also affect the grid role nudging it from hierarchical delivery to network sharing/rebalancing, and may even lead to separate local grids (like 100+ years ago). That also would give fossil fuels new demand (and also would be a market for small/compact nuclear). Kind of disintegration wave.

tehjoker2• 7 months ago

Isn't spinning up huge amounts of power on inefficient engines going to make climate impacts worse?

g8oz2• 7 months ago

>xAI entirely bypassed the grid and generated power onsite, using truck-mounted gas turbines and engines.

These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending.

xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!

https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/

mhb4• 7 months ago

Why is the skin tone of the residents of the affected community relevant?

ladidahh3• 7 months ago

In the US, we have a living history of discriminatory policies based on race

https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis

skywhopper3• 7 months ago

Because the people who decided where to locate it and the people in government who could do something to stop it make decisions about how much they care based on those folks’ skin color. If those generators were placed near a rich white neighborhood, the government response would be wildly different.

Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.

badc0ffee4• 7 months ago

I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).

Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.

butlike4• 7 months ago

Global issues start locally. See: tragedy of the commons

trhway2• 7 months ago

I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.

What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.

skywhopper3• 7 months ago

Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-air-p...

Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.

jordanb2• 7 months ago

Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time, which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.

You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.

osigurdson• 7 months ago

They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions can be very low if done correctly.

ACCount372• 7 months ago

Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was there for what, a decade already? Before it, there was a coal power plant there too.

Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.

cl0ckt0wer3• 7 months ago

We can sue to shut down pollution generators? Finally, I can get rid of that annoying airport...

kakapo5672• 7 months ago

Adding to their sins, many of those airports are in "historically black neighborhoods", you know!

mucle65• 7 months ago

The phrasing 'historically black neighborhoods' feels like it pushes a specific agenda rather than just addressing the pollution.

It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.

Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people living there now.

lawn• 7 months ago

It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.

I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.

guhidalg• 7 months ago

The phrase implies that powerful companies know that historically black neighborhoods don’t have the resources to mount a legal defense against abnormal pollution from data center generators, so the smart choice is to put all the pollution near historically black neighborhoods.

The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.

jasonwatkinspdx4• 7 months ago

It's because in the US historically black neighborhoods have a unique history of racism and disinvestment.

Here's an article about what happened literally where I'm sitting: https://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEE...

Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.

Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.

jLaForest• 7 months ago

That's a misreading of the term in the same way saying that the phrase 'black lives matter' imply white lives don't matter

The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.

If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient

immibis2• 7 months ago

It's because it's part of a more general pattern where bad things like this are preferentially done to black people. It's the same with highway locations. For some reason, when choosing where to demolish to build a highway, they prefer to demolish neighbourhoods with mostly black people.

thisgetsit• 7 months ago

xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!

80ish% in the US live <100 miles from their hometown.

It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."

Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of people.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/generations/millennials-...

So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As long as human biology exists humans will solve for those problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes, ethno objects that come and go with the generations.

Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to the living.

Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.

rangestransform• 7 months ago

The alternative to multiple jurisdictions racing to the bottom is strong centralized control to prevent anyone from racing to the bottom. That will be an even worse pill than datacenter pollution to swallow for Americans. Only the big cities are big enough to resist the race.

casey2• 7 months ago

TFA said it's all legal and explicit federal policy. You don't have to like it, but some people are going to have to make minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services. Look on the bright side, when these people all have personal robot doctors caring for them well into their 100s they will be grateful they didn't listen to the NIMBYs

strange_quark2• 7 months ago

I honestly cannot tell if this is satire. Literally a Lord Farquaad level take. Some of you may get asthma and lung cancer, but that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make to ensure we can deliver MechaHitler to the masses.

roze_sha• 7 months ago

Would you be willing to volunteer and make that sacrifice for the majority?

pastel87392• 7 months ago

some people are going to have to make minor sacrifices if the majority want AI services

_Does_ the majority want AI services? I feel like the question “if you could stop AI, would you?” is far too controversial for this to be the case.

ACCount372• 7 months ago

These "gas turbines" are located next door to the Allen Combined Cycle Plant, a grid scale natural gas power plant with 1.1GW capacity. It's there to power a nearby steel mill. That's the kind of neighborhood xAI has put its cluster in.

I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment, and "environmental racism" just reeks of the usual agenda pushing.

bob10292• 7 months ago

How tall are the stacks at the combined cycle plant compared to the ones at the xAI datacenter?

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/xai-datacen...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uPkQtSQzMZC3rPZB6

foobarqux2• 7 months ago

That plant is subject to regulations. The xAI turbines have evaded regulations by claiming that they are portable.

toofy2• 7 months ago

i’m curious, are you skeptical xai would wiggle around regulations and pollute a city?

by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.

anon7000• 7 months ago

Polluting the environment in any form is a violation of property rights. It’s unfortunate our government hasn’t codified that reality.

My neighbor’s don’t have a right to pollute my property by shining a bright light on it or blowing smoke into it or dumping chemicals into my underground well. Even if it’s mostly legal, it’s still a violation of my underlying right to property

HNisCIS• 7 months ago

Ah so because they're black people and they're already near _some_ pollution, we can just add _more_ pollution since they won't notice.

/s because some of you are fucking psychopaths

goku123• 7 months ago

Here are some quotes from an article [1] that directly addresses your point:

The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.
The turbines are only temporary and don’t require federal permits for their emissions of NOx and other hazardous air pollutants like formaldehyde, xAI’s environmental consultant, Shannon Lynn, said during a webinar hosted by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The argument appears to rely on a loophole in federal regulations that environmental groups and former EPA officials say shouldn’t apply to the situation.
Mayo and Lynn didn’t respond to calls and texts from POLITICO’s E&E News requesting comment and have not said publicly how much longer the “temporary” turbines will remain onsite. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

As you can see, xAI is being deliberately deceptive here and this has been known, but unaddressed for a while now. Remember that we are talking about a grave threat to the health and life of the entire population of a town. That too in a country where healthcare is deliberately unaffordable to ordinary folks. I don't know if you know how nasty formaldehyde and NOx smells.

How do you so casually trivialize and vilify such concerns as 'agenda pushing'? It's very sad that HN has too many apologists for these greedy serial violators and abusers. At the same time, the sheer lack of empathy towards the unprivileged is appalling! They're humans too!

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...

user____name• 7 months ago

Or the usual Musk externalizing costs and letting someone else handle the cleanup. Who's going to fine him? The government?

Zacharias0302• 7 months ago

This stance strikes me as questionable, to use the first hunch that comes to mind to seed doubt in a topic that is researched and reported by multiple fairly reputable sources and multiple people on the ground.

cfraenkel• 7 months ago

Just because one corp does something x bad, it means some other corp is ok to do something 10x bad?

There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.

twerka-stonk• 7 months ago

I enjoyed the detailed article despite how depressing it is. I never can blame business for finding a market-palatable solution.

However, it is worth saying that xAI’s “solution” was illegal, unhealthy for the local constituents, and stinks of corruption, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da....

AkelaA2• 7 months ago

I think it's funny that at no point in the article do they mention the idea of simply making LLMs more efficient. I guess that's not important when all you care about is winning the AI "race" rather then selling a long term sustainable product.

cl0ckt0wer3• 7 months ago

They are already power-constrained. Any efficiency improvements would immediately be allocated to more AI.

redox992• 7 months ago

If you make it more efficient, then you train it for longer or make it larger. You're not going to just idle your GPUs.

And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's going to use your model if someone else has a better model.

inkysigma• 7 months ago

What makes you think that the entire process isn't being made more efficient? There are entire papers dedicated to pulling out more FLOPs from GPUs so that less energy is being wasted on simply moving memory around. Of course, there's also inference side optimizations like speculative decoding and MoE. Some of these make the training process more expensive.

The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.

siliconc0w• 7 months ago

Kinda proving that these are a bad deal for communities - very few jobs and tax revenues, but enjoy the increased asthma and cancer we all get to pay for.

PunchyHamster3• 7 months ago

TL;DR by saying fuck environment

libraryofbabel2• 7 months ago

Does anyone know a really good source for basic information estimating what % of global carbon emissions come from AI training and AI inference, both 1) now and 2) in the future if we believe AI companies' capacity projections? I would really like to read a detailed analysis of this avoids both AI hype and anti-AI hysteria. It's an important question but it excites strong reactions that tend to cloud the facts.

Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?

Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)

lefra• 7 months ago

US grid carbon intensity is 0.384 gCO2/kWh (source: ourworldindata). US datacenter energy use in 2023: 176 TWh (excluding crypto, source US congress). How much of that is AI, I couldn't find.

So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546

For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...

libraryofbabel2• 7 months ago

Thanks, that’s interesting. IEA definitely seems like a solid source for this kind of thing.

1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)

Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.

seydor• 7 months ago

... and, all this for what ?

dzonga• 7 months ago

the rather uninformed question I had: but answered in comments below

was why not solar ? Yeah Hydrocarbons have no competition if you have to deploy power quickly

1.2GW is a small turbine - compared to the land & battery needed for Solar.

how about Gas ? if you're building in the middle of nowhere ? & there's no gas lines ?

cl0ckt0wer3• 7 months ago

If you just paid a jillion dollars for a shiny new AI datacenter, would you be ok with just running it during the day?

pastel87392• 7 months ago

Tesla is a battery company

phil21• 7 months ago

So all the predictable arguments aside...

Why is no one talking about the "other grid" capacity here?

Natural gas at this scale cannot be delivered by truck. It's piped in direct from fields, typically.

When do we run out of natural gas "grid" capacity in these locations? I can't imagine we're that overbuilt compared to the electrical grid itself?

The big freeze in Texas is a recent example of the natural gas grid having localized "brownouts" due to a few factors - one of which being the demand of all the natural gas peakers trying to fire at once.

Seems like this is the next infrastructure piece to have a supply crunch to me? There are places (North Dakota) so contranstrained by capacity to deliver gas to the "grid" that they simply flare it off because it's cheaper to pay the government to do that vs. lay pipe. This implies to me that natural gas is about to become more valuable.

credit_guy• 7 months ago

Here's my guess: there are lots of datacenters being built in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois [1]. Also in Texas, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Utah.

I think the first 5 states have this in common: there are lots of coal burning power plants that were shut down, but can be restarted and hooked to the grid on a relatively short notice. The grid is also quite good in this region.

In Texas, it is likely that new power can be generated with a combination of solar, wind, gas, and fast permitting.

I don't have an explanation for Georgia.

For Arizona, and perhaps Nevada and Utah too, I think it is likely to be solar.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/data-center-growth-map-stat...

aschla• 7 months ago

Don't know about the others, but Illinois permanently shut down (and demolished or repurposed the land) the majority of its coal power plants over the past couple decades.

Illinois gets about half its power from nuclear (we have 6 plants and 11 reactors), followed by natural gas at around 20%, and then about equal amounts of coal and wind, at around 10-15%.

So Illinois is actually a pretty decent place to build datacenters, from a clean power generation perspective.

https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=IL

ptx• 7 months ago

There's not a single mention of pollution or clean energy or the environment in the entire article. Presumably the regulatory requirements for these generators are less stringent than for proper power plants, so the costs are pushed onto the rest of society (having to deal with the environmental impact) while Microsoft et al. keep the profits?

deflator• 7 months ago

Cool article. It's pretty weird that the writer seems to attribute all decisions by xAI to Mr. Musk personally. I doubt he is closely involved in such technical projects.

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