| ▲ | peri-cl 3 hours ago |
| I'm very curious what happens now to the several gigawatts of fuel cells, that this project supposedly purchased to supply power. > "Oracle signed a deal with solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) developer Bloom last year for 1.8GW of power, expanding it to 2.8GW of capacity in April." https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/new-mexico-regula... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_Energy I was surprised to read we're already building fuel cell power plants on this scale (this is a first of its kind project—by far this startup's largest customer). I didn't realize the tech was that mature. Now I'm left wondering if they actually ever intended to, or whether this was some kind of circular financial-engineering vaporware. |
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| ▲ | mynti 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The tech has always been mature enough but simply too expensive. But since combustion engines are sold out for the next years, data centers are rushing to get anything they can. So the extra millions for power generation will be a rounding error |
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| ▲ | onlyrealcuzzo 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Electricity is about 3% of their total operating cost, so, yes. | | |
| ▲ | hylaride 27 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | There is no way it's 3% if they're getting electricity from the grid, even if they get their cooling from somewhere else (eg lake/river water or outside air in winter). Median DCs are anywhere from 25-40% (depending on the jurisdiction's electricity costs and how much cooling they need). Hypercaler datacenters tend to be even more dense than the median traditional ones. | |
| ▲ | FuriouslyAdrift 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Energy is the largest OPEX by far (70-80%)... taxes second. https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown | | |
| ▲ | cyanydeez 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Anyone who puts a local model on a GPU understands how much heat they produce. Its amusing watching cloud AI users struggle to grasp even direct impacts of their use. |
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| ▲ | fedecaccia 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The cost of electricity is (almost) negligible compared to the cost of having GPUs sitting idle. Electricity from fuel cells can be twice as expensive, but even then, it represents only about an extra ~15% of the amortization cost associated with keeping the GPU hardware idle. | |
| ▲ | pjc50 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That seems surprising - source? What's the other 97%? Does this include ops staff? | | |
| ▲ | nomorewords an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Without having done any research at this point I would assume it's mostly the amortized cost of hardware - GPUs, memory etc | | | |
| ▲ | doikor an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The stuff inside the buildings (servers, switches, storage, cooling, etc) basically the stuff using the electricity and salaries/sub contractors (in addition to some techs handling the servers think security, cleaning, storage management, receiving shipments of new hardware, etc). Some taxes (depends a lot where) | |
| ▲ | simon-b an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I saw a breakdown (don't have on hand sorry) where server depreciation was by far the majority. Power was the largest cash opex, probably matching your intuition. |
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| ▲ | walthamstow an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Electricity is only 3% of opex for a data centre? |
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| ▲ | trebligdivad 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Oh that's a fun use - I'd heard some data centres were using fuel cells/mains-gas as a back up power source but using it as main power is interesting. |
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| ▲ | thinkcontext 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They can be resold, they have great value for anyone wanting to provide their own power to a DC. Demand is so high they might be able to make a profit. |
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| ▲ | arijun 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I thought fuel cells were an energy storage system, not an energy generation system. Surely it’s cheaper to just connect the data center to the generation directly (either by upgrading the grid to handle it or building generators nearby). |
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| ▲ | peri-cl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Fuel cells are an electricity generation method. They oxidize fuels (methane, hydrogen) at low temperature, electrochemically, without combustion—going directly from fuel to electrons. This would have been simply a natural gas power plant, of a different type. | | |
| ▲ | m4rtink 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm really wondering about the air filtering needed for this to work. Gas turbines are already quite sensitive to bigger particles in the air but for the fuel cell membranes, this could be a much harder problem. | | |
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| ▲ | numpad0 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Most fuel cells can't be recharged. They take combustible gases, re-assemble the molecules in the gas into H2O or something chemically stable, and release the energy delta as voltage potentials. The cells work purely as catalysts. Only the fuels are expended. It's just a type of battery, that takes fuel, as its refillable energy source. Weird but it works. | |
| ▲ | boringg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "either by upgrading the grid to handle it or building generators nearby" -- probably in the long run but in the short run impossible. Generators and utility interconnections are back ordered. I think gas turbines are back ordered like 3+ years. Bloom is super expensive for what it is. It's only doing well right now because demand for power surged and they have a product that can fill the gap, hypothetically, quickly. | |
| ▲ | smallerize an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, there is a completely different thing with the same name. Race cars can use fuel cells to prevent sloshing. Those are basically fuel tanks with foam in them. | |
| ▲ | notatoad 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That was not my understanding. Unless this installation was supposed to be producing fuel on site somehow, fuel cells are a mechanism for turning fuel into electricity. https://www.bloomenergy.com/technology/ | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | In Motorsport a gas tank is called a fuel cell. That may be where the confusion lies |
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