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.
NVidia designing, building and selling these sorts of cards with astronomical power usage? I get it. They want to stay at the top.
But those buying these cards at least need to be taxed, charged, regulated, whatever to make sure the huge additional power they require is funded by said company, and should only be green/renewable energy sources. And not using clean drinking water communities need for cooling.
If companies want to run massive amounts of hardware like this, it should be prohibitively expensive unless they build their own GREEN power stations, and find ways to cool without using drinking water from any community.
At the moment, taxes and government money goes into power stations which these DCs then use. All the cost is pushed right down onto the every day tax payer and consumer. But all the profit is flowing upwards.
Make them pay for what they use. Make them pay to make these cards efficient, clean, and safe for our environment. Its not like these trillion dollar companies couldn’t pay for it all and make the world a better place.
Using tons of energy isn’t a problem, as long as it’s carbon neutral (or negative). The problem is that we are simply not there yet. Taxing carbon is a great solution and would nearly immediately fix the problem (on the scale of years, not decades).