• usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml
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    19 days ago

    Agreed that land and water are smaller compared to agriculture, but the electricity usage change is significant. The LLM boom is unlike prior datacenter workloads. The electrical demand is far higher due to the more power hungry chips and running them at full utilization. It’s projected to go from 5% to 15% of all US electrical demand in quite a short amount of time

    This is delaying the closures of fossil fuel plants (here’s an example of 15 coal plants in the US last year), and starting to rely more heavily on generators to install capacity faster despite solar/wind being far cheaper