What happens at night?

You’re being sarcastic, right?

Sure if you like

There are a few ways to store excess energy generated during the day. Usually batteries are the obvious answer.

One of the great things about batteries is that the metal used in them is recyclable and can be repurposed to make new batteries. So, at some point, we’ll barely need to be mining the metals used in those.

Compare that to petroleum products which, if not for green energy, would always needs to be extracting more and more to be able to satisfy an increasing demand of energy.

Its one of those things right?

If AI was so great we should be seeing OpenAI and Anthropic investing in high schools and Universities, “the next generation” so to speak. If AI is “so cool” we should be seeing investment in the next generation to use it. But we are not seeing that, OpenAI got $50 billion from Nvidia and all of that went on Nvidia GPUs, none of it went towards the people who will be using it in 20 years!

You have this thing that a lot of very rich people think is going to be biger than the printing press or the internet and they are not facilitating people to learn it… Their moto seems to be “build it and they will come”.

Think what you want about AI… “It is the best thing since sliced bread” or “it is the Anti Christ”. These companies need 10x even 100x uptake to justify this years spending, Alone. Never mind next financial year. These companies need so much more uptake to be profitable to the point where the level of investment from the MAANG companies makes sence that we should be seeing investment in schools and universitiy programs for these tools to be used so that the next generation and the generation after that, wants to use these tools. Amazon used to run hackathons where they would promote their tools over Microsoft or Google because they knew the developers who use their tech will advocate for their tech. We are not aeeing that level of support for AI tools and, to me, that speaks volumes.

I’m gonna throw some numbers around based on a conversation with my friend the other day.

He works at an oil refinery nearby and under heavy load the whole facility can use up to 150MW of electricity. That’s while being rated as one of the least environmentally harmful refineries in the US. They have ~300 acres of solar panels supplying ~35MW over the course of a full day (~50MW during daylight hours). That means 20~25% of their power needs are fully renewable.

He also mentioned that the new Meta datacenter going up nearby is projected to use ~400MW! That’s two and a half oil refineries! That also means that to cover its electricity use they would need to set up ~2800 acres of solar panels. That’s ~11 times the footprint of the datacenter itself and two large farms worth of space on some of the best farmland in the country!

They definitely should be 100% powering the facility with renewables, but even then I don’t think model training justifies the space and resources that need to be invested to accomplish that.

So, requiring them to cover their datacenters with solar farms would lessen power requirements by 9% plus whatever offset to cooling costs, that’s not nothing as we try to find ways to power these things beyond private natural gas plants, which they can’t keep doing.

That should definitely be the barest minimum, it’s just insane to me how much one of these data centers demands. Even beyond the privacy/copyright concerns, it doesn’t seem to me like the benefits of training models faster justifies the costs.

@Jaycifer solar farms are not exclusive with agricultural farms, though. Especially in areas with a high DLI (lots of sunlight most of the year) they are complimentary: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshpearce/2025/11/15/why-farmers-are-shielding-their-crops-with-solar-panels/

I didn’t state the State, but this is in Minnesota where 53% of the total land area is farmland. Generally speaking if land isn’t forested or inhabited it’s safe to assume it’s being farmed. This datacenter is being built by the oil refinery which is just outside the main metro area of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St Paul) where the farmland really picks up. Wind turbines could be an alternative, but since my friend said it was solar power set up by the refinery I’m assuming that would be the option the datacenter would use as well.

@Jaycifer I am guessing you did not read the article I linked at all because there are substantial agrovoltaic installations in Minnesota already

I didn’t, and I’ll own that! I saw your definition of DLI, recalled the dark winters we get here, and assumed it would be about somewhere other than Minnesota! A second thought may have reminded me that growing crops the rest of the year does require a lot of sunlight.

That’s neat! Zooming in on the map I might have gone right by one while heading out camping this last weekend and assumed it was not for farming.

I don’t know that Meta is interested in getting into farming enough to make use of agrivoltaics for their datacenter, but it’s good to know that’s a potential option for farmers!

The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US’s largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.

Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.

Why are data centers in viable farmland? Put them in the desert