Lacey: AI data centers need grid transmission, not advanced nuclear breakthroughs
Stephen Lacey · US power demand is set to boom. How will we meet it? · Feb 1, 2024 · at 7:54
Stephen Lacey pushes back against tech executives like Sam Altman advocating for advanced nuclear to satisfy AI computational energy requirements.
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“I don't think we really need any energy breakthroughs to serve these data centers, though. We just need a lot more transmission to get clean power to these data centers, and it's, I mean, it's an infrastructure challenge and there are a lot of ways that you can build more modular data centers that directly connect to, you know, that are direct off-takers of renewable electricity, so there's ways that you can, and then you can create data centers that have specific workloads, like data centers with AI-specific workloads that can be cycled differently than other services on the internet, and so there are ways to adjust the output and computational workloads of data centers, build them differently, and then just build the infrastructure around it. We don't need some advanced nuclear breakthrough to serve this particular load.”
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