This is off-topic and I'm no fan of xAI or any company circumventing rules to allow them to use dirty energy sources.

That said.

> Normally, that would be enough to keep around 15,000 homes up and running.

Am I the only one who finds this kind of comparison meaningless? Like it's supposed invoke a feeling of "15K homes worth of power! How absurd that a data center use that much!" but that kind of how all centralized things work. That datacenter does work for, one would assume, way more than just 15K homes and if those homes wanted the same "work" output they'd use the same, or most likely, more energy to accomplish the same thing.

In many/most cases they aren't using electricity just to use it, they are using it because people are paying them for the output. With economies of scale I would guess a datacenter is many times more efficient than if we were all running local models at home.

Again, not an argument for data centers as much as I find this comparison always pointless.

It's like using bathtubs as a unit of measure for large volumes of water. Yes it communicates the scale, but abjectly fails to communicate the relative in-cohort comparison i.e. is this a lot of power for an industrial user? Is it wasting power /generating more emissions relative to other similar applications or not?

Mainstream news is pitched at an audience that hasn't got a clue what is a joule or a kilogram. You must've seen Sam Altman make the efficiency argument for data centers. But it deliberately bypasses the point, which is that data centers and frontier AI companies are systemically important and must be supported for the good of the nation.

I mean, they need to give an intuition of the magnitude. Tell me, what do you think when I say “a GPU consumes 1 kW of power”? What does that even mean to the regular Joe?

It is pretty easy to compare against homes because they consume on average 1 kWh of electricity (in the U.S.). It could be something else, but 99% of people have homes they live in, so this is something directly linked to their experiences. So it is not meaningless at all.

As always, remind yourself: "the outrage is the product". The entire point of slotting something like that in is to get eyeballs and produce outrage on tap. It's the new dopamine. Justified or not is irrelevant, what matters is to have a talking point you can use to rile things up, no matter how pointless it is.