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How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/11/nx-s1-5088134/elon-musk-ai-xai-supercomputer-memphis-pollution

“The local utility says it’s going to need a million gallons of water per day and 150 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 100,000 homes per year. “

I wasn’t sure what they meant with that water usage. Like does the water get recirculated and it’s a one time expense? Or is it a million gallons discharged into a river or sewer ever single day? Is it tainted? Or just evaporates from a cooling tower? Seems like a huge waste.

3 comments

Rhaedas

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This is the scale of things that Microsoft of all things considered and discarded because of what it could do to the power grid. But they didn't have a genius behind the wheel, so it'll be fine.

aubeynarf

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Water is another issue for xAI. Data centers use massive amounts of water to cool their servers; xAI says it will need 1 million gallons of water a day

“It would put stress on the wellfield,” says Scott Schoefernacker, science director for Protect Our Aquifer. He adds that “a lot of the water is just being used as cooling and it evaporates.”

Presumably it’s for evaporative cooling towers? I can’t imagine they’re heating it up from ambient and dumping it down the drain.

aubeynarf

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They say supercomputer, but do they count Google/Amazon datacenters or just “named” supercomputers like the DoE’s scientific clusters?

AWS surely has more total compute capacity across its many datacenters