Lex Fridman
(03:46:16) Can the power grid support this kind of growth?
Dylan Patel
(03:46:19) Trump’s executive orders… There was a Biden executive order before the end of the year, but then Trump had some more executive orders, which hopefully reduced the regulations to where, yes, things can be built. But yeah, this is a big, big challenge. Is building enough power fast enough?
Lex Fridman
(03:46:33) Are you going to basically have a nuclear power plant next to a data center for each one of these?
Dylan Patel
(03:46:39) The fun thing here is this is too slow to build the power plant. To build a power plant or to reconfigure an existing power plant, it’s too slow. And so therefore, you must use…
(03:46:51) Data center power consumption is flat, right? I mean, [inaudible 03:46:53].
Nathan Lambert
(03:46:53) This is why nuclear is also good for it. Long term, nuclear is a very natural fit, but…
Dylan Patel
(03:46:58) Yes.
Nathan Lambert
(03:46:58) … data-
(03:46:59) You can’t do solar or anything in the short term like that.
Dylan Patel
(03:47:03) Because data center power’s like this, right? You’re telling me I’m going to buy tens of billions of dollars of GPUs and idle them because the power’s not being generated? Power’s cheap. If you look at the cost of a cluster, less than 20% of it is power. Most of it is the capital cost and depreciation of the GPUs. And so it’s like, “Well, screw it. I’ll just build natural gas plants.” This is what Meta is doing in Louisiana, this is what OpenAI is doing in Texas, and all these different places. They may not be doing it directly, but they are partnered with someone. And so, there is a couple of hopes.
(03:47:34) One is… And Elon, what he’s doing in Memphis is to the extreme. They’re not just using dual combine cycle gas which is super efficient, he’s also just using single cycle and mobile generators and stuff which is less efficient. But there’s also the flip side, which is solar power generation is like this, and wind is another like this. Different correlate different. So if you stack both of those, plus you get a big chunk of batteries, plus you have a little bit of gas, it is possible to run it more green. It’s just the time scales for that is slow. So, people are trying. But Meta basically said, “Whatever. I don’t care about my sustainability pledge.” Or they’ll buy a power… It’s called a PPA, Power Purchasing Agreement, where there’ll be a massive wind farm or solar farm wherever. And then, they’ll just pretend like those electrons are being consumed by the data center. But in reality, they’re paying for the power here and selling it to the grid, and they’re buying power here.
(03:48:26) And then another thing is Microsoft quit on some of their sustainability pledges. Elon, what he did with Memphis is objectively somewhat dirty, but he is also doing it in an area where there’s a bigger natural gas plant right next door and a sewer next… Or not a sewer, but a wastewater treatment and a garbage dump nearby. And he’s obviously made the world a lot more clean than that one data center is going to do, so I think it’s fine to some extent. And maybe, AGI solves global warming and stuff, whatever it is.
(03:48:55) This is the attitude that people at the labs have, which is like, “Yeah, it’s great. We’ll just use gas,” because the race is that important. And if we lose, that’s way worse.
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