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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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

I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.

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.

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

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

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.

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...

their uploaded minds will enjoy the infinite AI slop though

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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?

They likely use multiple engines.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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

For those like me that are missing context:

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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".

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...

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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