I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 Keynote and it made my Blood Run Cold
By John Loeffler techradar 06/03/2024
"There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.
"The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.
"Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at data centers around the world.
"One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.
"Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.
"I always feared that the AI data center boom was likely going to make the looming climate catastrophe inevitable, but there was something about seeing it all presented on a platter with a smile and an excited presentation that struck me as more than just tone-deaf. It was damn near revolting."