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I don't understand why datacenters especially shouldn't be able to run mostly on renewables.

This won't apply to every datacenter, but the AI inference ones especially, should be seeing most demand during the day. So what's built in north America is used when it's daylight there?

If so, isn't that a perfect case for solar?

To be clear, I'm not saying it can power down, but at night it should be able to scale down significantly?



> should be seeing most demand during the day

I don't know if this is necessarily true - latency isn't really important for inference in the same way as many other services (at least the max ~300ms latency you get from hitting something on the other side of the globe) - compute in NA can serve all the other timezones just fine.


The most of the cost is GPU, not power.

Demand for AI is global (except for Anthropic, haha).

When you build a DC that works only when the sun is shining, you are wasting half of you GPU capacity


That's why you build batteries that can store electricity for the other half. Or maybe nuclear power.


The batteries are expensive. Otherwise I'd expect to see wholesale electricity prices fluctuate a lot less.




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