calaphos

heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity

Interestingly enough the price for these giant heatpumps is pretty much in line with domestic ~10kw units.

That is comparing an all to all switched Nvlink fabric to a 3D torus for TPUs. Those are completely different network topologies with different tradeoffs.

For example the currently very popular Mixture of Experts architectures require a lot of all to all traffic (for expert parallelism) which works a lot better on the switched NVlink fabric as opposed where it doesn't need to traverse multiple links in the torus.

It's the one exception in the semiconductor supply chain where Europe is still leading. For all other parts of the value creation Europe is either a niche player at best or completely absent, well into the actual application layer.

The hardware is heavily optimized for low precision matrix math, pretty much only used for AI.

to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini

Why a model specifically distilled down for logical reasoning tasks? I would expect larger models to produce a wider variety of outputs.

But these social third places have also shifted. Younger generations aren't going out as much but e.g. playing video games specifically with other close friends is very popular.

Inference throughout scales really well with larger batch sizes (at the cost of latency) due to rising arithmetic intensity and the fact that it's almost always memory BW limited.

If it's just filtered out in the training sets, adding the information as context should work out fine - after all this is exactly how o3, Gemini 2.5 and co deal with information that is newer than their training data cutoff.

Something where you're reachable for any legal purposes- in Germany this sadly remains a physical address.

There are various service which offer a 'virtual' address with digital forwarding of letters for less than 10Eur/Month, so it's not an insurmountable obstacle.

There's still a throughput/latency tradeoff curve, at least for any sort of interactive models.

One of the reasons why inference providers sell batch discounts.

There's also big efficiency increases when batching multiple requests, making clouds inherently more cost effective for normal use cases.

Way better utilization of expensive hardware as well ofc.

Mixture of experts involves some trained router components which routes to specific experts depending on the input, but without any terms enforcing load distribution this tends to collapse during training where most information gets routed to just one or two experts.

It's not quite waste heat because the cold side of thermal power plants wants to be colder than district heating temperatures for best efficiency. There is some loss in electrical efficiency compared to non cogeneration plants, but the combined efficiency is a lot higher.

Used to be a common thing for storing analog signals in the past :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory

Apparently Chinese mainstream silicon PV modules are already a bit cheaper at ~0.14USD/W right now.

Article doesn't talk about efficiencies but it seems production perovskite modules are slightly lower than their silicon counterparts, which will affect downstream costs like land or mounting hardware a bit.

Has been really common in HPC for quite a while. I presume the higher interconnect/network of hpc favour the higher density of liquid cooling. Hardware utilization is also higher compared to normal datacenters, so the additional efficiency vs air cooling is more useful.

Poland was dealing with similar brain drain problems, but now that economic opportunities are there educated people are returning.

Intels surprisingly fast 14nm processors come to mind. Born of necessity as they couldn't get their 10 and later 7nm processes working for years. Despite that Intel managed to keep up in single core performance with newer 7nm AMD chips, although at a mich higher power draw.

If you invest a lot of money into very expensive Nvidia training hardware you certainly want to run them as close to 24/7 as possible.

Dispatchable load usually means oversizing the dispatchable consumer to get the same overall output. This is already uneconomical for even particularly energy intensive industries (e.g. aluminum smelting). I would assume server hardware is a lot more capital intensive than that.

The API and featureset so far looks like a one to one reimplementation of JAX without the jit functionality.

What does this do differently? AFAIK Jax has an experimental apple GPU backend as well.

The article is about building costs per mile. If anything lower density should make construction simpler.

If everything goes to plan the whole thing is pretty clean - all the dangerous products stay contained and ideally don't ever interact with the overall environment. And the space efficency is high as well, there isn't a lot of land needed for a lot of electricity.

The cuda cores of Nvidia GPUs are closer to fp32 units in vector ALUs than CPU cores capable of operating independently in parallel. Following that definition a modern CPU core would have dozens of "cuda cores" as well (although far fewer than GPUs optimized for that kind of workload)

More comparable would be the ~130 streaming Multiprocessors of a H100.

Modern Thermal power plants reached Thermal efficenies of 45-50% for coal and closed cycle gas turbines. ICE cars have a hard time reaching 25% under normal conditions. Additionally burning methane has lower CO2 emissions than gasoline and a third of the US grid is produced from carbon free sources anyway.

The same reason that France is utterly failing at building flamaville 3 - it's not a technical problem but of regulation, government and public support.

For automatic differentiation (backpropagation) you need to store the intermediate results per layer of the forward pass. With checkpointing you can only store every nth layer and recompute the rest accordingly to reduce memory requirements in favor of more compute.

Noticably when encountering issues with welds last year they also shut down all reactors with shared components for inspection/maintenance.

While this has been a real problem and got them into some supply tight spots over winter it definitely speaks for their approach to safety.

For regular commuters the price is a big deal. Not only where tickets crossing multiple zones complicated to get but also unreasonably expensive (~200Eur/Month). In contrast the 49 Euros is less expensive than (almost?) any single zone monthly ticket out there.

The 39ct/kWh are an artifact of the European gas crisis 2022, nowadays were closer to the still high 30ct/kWh as before. For a long time renewable energy was subsidized directly from (household) electricity prices. Same is true for grid investments, which are drastically rising, partly due to Windpower being produced in in the north and used in the south.

IMHO part of the problem is definitely due to shutdown of nuclear, rapid expansion of renewables while keeping costly (due to EU CO2 emissions trade) coal plants going. Most other countries used renewables to replace coal plants while keeping existing nuclear around. Germany did the opposite.

But the international comparison is not as simple as the power price, there's a lot of infrastructure that is subsidized by other taxes and not power price directly. Not that those are any lower in Germany.

That is a really good price for that many cores. Especially the 80 core variant competes favourably with much more expensive (last gen) 64 core Epyc Rome CPUs.