Insight
Belady: Chip efficiency gains increase total power demand via Jevons Paradox
“In fact, getting it very efficient may actually drive more use of it to where it'll increase and not decrease. And so I think there's a much broader view you have to take when someone says something's more efficient, it's, and they say it's going to solve all …”
Opinion
Belady: AI's biggest benefit is hardware engineering efficiency, not consumer chatbots
“The reality is the real benefit is engineering the products that we have to drive efficiency. And I see. I see that happening relatively slowly.”
Opinion
Belady: Moore's Law made the hardware industry complacent for six decades
“And frankly, it's actually made the industry complacent. Not much has changed over the years in the past six decades. If you look at it, cause Moore's law pretty much gave performance improvements for free.”
Assertion Supported
Belady: Multi-Chip Modules Drive Power Requirements Up Every Generation
“Now what you're seeing is As you're integrating more and more and getting more and more into the multi chip module, the power keeps going up generation after generation. And so that's a kind of a new dynamic that's really driving a faster need for power to go …”
Insight
Belady: AI power demand is purely additive, unlike cloud efficiency migrations
“So now what you see is AI coming along and that's like a completely new application and it's a massive application. So now that's just stacking on top of this other transition of, as things move from enterprise Into the cloud. And now your stack on top of that…”
Insight
Belady: Speed of light latency forces AI into massive, centralized data centers
“I think, and again, this is probably beyond my scope, but I think it really has to do with the size of the models and the latency, right? It takes too much time for light to travel larger distances, as hard as that is to believe. And so they tend to concentrat…”
Opinion
Belady: Dispatching data center backup generators could solve short-term grid shortages
“That's something that we could probably use everywhere in the short term. That's a way to solve that, the energy shortage problem. I don't think it's magic. Every data center has generation, backup generation. Why, why can't it be used?”
Opinion
Belady: AI Growth Is Constrained by Broad Physical Supply Chains, Not Just Power
“I think we're moving into a world where it's not It's not demand driven, it's supply driven. You know, and we talk about power, but I think it's more than just power. It's trades to build data centers, right?”
Assertion Contradicted
Belady: Microsoft's 2016 Cheyenne grid-interactive power model was never duplicated
“That was in 2016 that was done. It's almost a decade later, and I don't think it's ever been duplicated.”
Assertion Supported
Belady: Modern data center backrooms consume only 10% to 20% of power
“And at one time that was like,
Two to three times the power was consumed in the back room, and then with the advent of PUE, people really focused on making data centers much more efficient, so now only about 10 to 20% of the power in a data center is consumed …”
Assertion Supported
Belady: Modern GPU modules consume 1,000 watts compared to 200W CPUs
“Yeah, the traditionally CPUs run in the realm of about a hundred to 200 watts is typically what they would consume in terms of power. GPUs are substantially more, and generation after generation, it's increased And they're 200. And 50 watts to the earlier vers…”
Assertion Supported
Belady: Cloud applications are 93% to 95% more efficient than on-premise
“We did a study that I sponsored back in, I'd say maybe about 10 years ago or so, looking at the efficiency of the cloud versus on-prem and it was like 95% or 93% more, more efficient to run your applications in the cloud because you don't have as many wasted a…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Belady: Building one Virginia data center required all electricians within 200 miles
“I remember there was a time where I was building a data center in Virginia and we consumed a 200 mile radius of all of the electricians in the region in Southern Virginia had to pay overtime for them to travel. And that was for 30 megawatts.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Belady: Microsoft Data Center Team Had No Dedicated Power Specialist in 2010
“When I was running the data center team back in 2010, 2011, we didn't even have a power guy. Right? It was a non-issue, and it took me a year to justify hiring a power guy, and that guy was, and I think you interviewed him, was Brian Janis.”
Insight
Belady: Scaling new data center technology takes five to ten years
“All these things, opportunity after opportunity, and very little investment is going to do that, and it usually takes five, 10 years to actually take a technology and put it in at scale.”
Disclosure
Belady: Hired Biologists onto Data Center R&D Team
“And so in my R and D team, I hired biologists because I do believe there's this responsibility we have with technology to actually integrate it with nature.”
Assertion Supported
Belady: Microsoft Implemented Data Center Designs Boosting Pollinator Habitats
“And to Microsoft's credit, we did implement this where the data centers are being looked at to try to see how can we change the design so that we increase pollinators and habitat for pollinators so the fields around it get, have healthier yield”
