Technically most sources of available energy on or near the planet are the output of fusion in some way, so this tracks.

Your implication is misguided, solar is in fact the most practical way to add more electricity for most countries.

The US generated an additional 64Twh of solar in 2024 compared to 2023. To get the same amount from nuclear you would need to build 5 large reactors in one year.

As for land mass, we can re-use already spent land mass, like rooftops, parking lots, grazing farmland and such. Solar can also be placed on lakes.

So for the foreseeable future there is no actual need for new land to be dedicated to solar.

Even though I think solar is impractical as a primary source for various reasons, it doesn't take a lot.

David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air" did a calculation circa 2010. To fulfill the world's energy needs back then, a 10 km^2 area in the Sahara desert would be sufficient. Even if you scaled that to 100 km^2, it's absolutely tiny on a global scale, and panels have only become more efficient since then.

The challenge of course is storage and distribution, but yeah, in terms of land area, it's not much.

It's worth considering total lifecycle use of water (mining, production and operation) for nuclear and solar.

Solar: ~300-800 L/MWh [0]

Nuclear: ~3000 L/MWh [1]

0: https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Water_Footpr...

1: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1569_web.pdf

3,000-4,000 acres per GW of production capacity in the US Southwest. According to AI :)

Considering how little use there is for most of that land anyways, it seems like a good option to me.

Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.

>How much land mass would need to be covered by solar panels to power this future AI infrastructure

Probably zero agricultural if you mandate all rooftops to be solar. And all parking lots to be covered with solar roofs.

it needs to be better connected over larger distances i guess. Some 'sunny' countries around the equator are working on it. laying gridlines to other less sunny places and trying to offer solar to reduce carbon taxes or whatever.

i know Saudi, Morocco and China are all massively dumping panels into their deserts, likely more places too. these are great places to put them as it has less impact on environment (less wildlife etc.) and it's pretty much always sunny during the daytime, so it's high efficient per m/2 comparted to colder more cloudy places.

Morocco already is connected for energy providing to Europe via Spain afaik, though i think that is currently not used yet, so they are in a good position to leverage that as power demands surge across EU datacenters trying to compete in AI :'D (absolutely no clue if they will actually go that route but it seems logical!)

Tariffs, regulatory quick sand, political pressure...

Nothing other than the fact that renewables won't be able to keep up if the AI demand keeps growing the way it has been

They just buy a contract from a power distribution company. They don't care where it comes from.

If you want the PD companies to have a different blend, then they need carrots and sticks.

Demand is too high, same goes for nuclear which takes too long to build.

I'll tell ya, it certainly doesn't match the nuclear fusion production curve!

That's interesting - I would generally like to use something like Cluade Code heavily during work hours and sparsely otherwise. Plus I assume most LLM-for-knowledge-work-at-industrial-scale demand will be similar as these datacentres are built out.

America has a few time zones to move the peaks around in a little bit. The world has plenty. Luckily AI power consumption doesn't have to be located where the consumer is.

I mean, it could.

As we build out solar, daytime power will become cheaper than nighttime power.

Some people will eventually find it economical to time-shift their consumption to daytime hours, including saving any non-interactive computation for those hours, and shutting down unneeded compute at night.

[citation needed]

I don't know if they are woke but I think people vastly overestimate their efficacy and efficiency because they believe it means that they have correct opinions and are part of the group of "good people."