I think that's the datacenter with the gas turbine generators that operate without permits because they're "portable." Data centers have tremendous externalities but colossus is a particularly nasty offender, and not just due its size.
The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year).
I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.
I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.
Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.
As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.
The biggest issue with the interim onsite generation is the lack of meaningful stack height on the generating units.
Airplanes by virtue of their mode of operation stay out of the unhappy regime most of the time. Also, engines at/near idle produde orders of magnitude less emissions. Those aeroderivative generators are running at full capacity 24/7.
Dumping exhaust at ground level continuously is probably much worse than the airport. Even if it's a FedEx world hub.
Solar and batteries are a bad choice for a constant 24/7 load.
That's the exact reason we will never go fully solar (or wind) unless an insanely impressive battery breakthrough makes storage effectively free while using only common, renewable components rather than rare earths.
Solar, wind, etc are excellent parts of an energy system, but its nearly impossible to cover base load at scale with generation that may only run for 0-5 hours a day.
> The new plant in Minnesota will be big enough to deliver 300 megawatts of power and store an enormous 30 gigawatt-hours of energy, making it the largest battery by capacity that’s been announced so far. By comparison, that’s more storage than all of the battery projects built in the U.S. in 2024 added together.
That's to power a single data center though, how would that scale?
If I'm doing the math right, Minnesota used 65.7 TWh of power last year so to store 3 days worth of power just for that one city we would need a battery 18x larger than the one mentioned here.
I can't imagine we could ever scale such storage capacity for all energy use, let alone all the wind and solar required to fill it.
Sodium is an interesting chemistry, though it has different voltage curves than lithium ion once hardware is built to match it they may scale well for industrial use.
That still doesn't avoid the more fundamental math of having to store such massive amounts of energy though, even if you skip batteries and pump water to retention ponds uphill.
Even for small scale residential, the recommendation is to store 3 days worth of average usage to handle stretches of cloudy days and to have a generator for the times when that still doesn't cut it. You also need enough solar that 4-6 hours of generation can fill those batteries back up after a stretch of cloudy days.
You also have to contend with frequency issues. This is what took down Spain's grid, they had turned on a ton of solar at the time - with many gas plants offline a seemingly small dip below 60Hz really wrecks much of the system when it wasn't designed to handle those swings and triggers multiple safety mechanisms.
Interesting, I read this series of posts and as someone who does not have a dog in this fight but does have a more than passing background in both audio engineering and datacenter engineering, the response Masley gives here to the very first criticism is fundamentally incorrect. I haven't read the rest of this, but his claim about sound intensity what it would imply about energy is on its face untrue.
When you take a measurement of a sound, you are measuring both its pressure and its intensity, that is what is implied by a measurement in decibels. The measurement is taken from the point of the measurement device/listener in relation to the source/generator. If the measured value is potentially harmful, there is no such implication about needing to redirect additional energy to make it harmful, it's already been measured as potentially harmful at the point of measurement.
It's basically nonsense. My most charitable interpretation of his very first responsive argument is he's saying that a datacenter would need to intentionally direct energy towards increasing the intensity of its sound output to make Jordan's original measurements meaningful. That's neither how measurement works, nor how sound works, nor even how datacenters work. Things like sound and heat are BYPRODUCTS and not the point of the datacenter, both have an intensity, and that intensity is measurable, and any energy which is expended towards that intensity is energy that was wasted away from doing computations.
I stopped reading after this. I don't know if Masley is out of his element or just practicing motivated reasoning and thinks his readers are stupid. Either way, his rebuttal already failed on the first point.
> Jordan is suspiciously lurching to the extremely high energy end of the light spectrum when we know that the low energy end (comparable to infrasound) doesn’t have negative impacts on us if we can’t detect its presence.
Masley spouts the falsifiable propaganda that any photon (light/emf) below ionizing radiation energy can only cause “heat” and can have no other possible harm effects.
Many science-minded people (though more accurately in this case, billiard-world materialists) have become quite militant defenders of this idea (ostensibly fighting off the hoardes of tinfoil hatters and quantum aquarians sensitive to 5g).
This point is very plausible military industrial propaganda. There were numerous studies with evidence (starting from the 60s) such as - non ionizing radiation (eg hv powerlines) might cause lots of cancer, and it’s weaponized (sub-thermal) usage can microwave the brains of enemy spies. THOSE studies have come out in declassified and leaked docs.
Now we have several plausible and serious theories of mechanism for low-f light disrupting biology that lean into quantum biology. While the iceberg of quantum biology understanding is still in its early decades, the mounting downstream evidence of health and medical issues are established public knowledge.
I dont know, Id say the enraging thing is that the government is so incompetent and unable to expand electricity supply that datacenters are forced into using loopholes to get power the only way they can.
> Id say the enraging thing is that the government is so incompetent and unable to expand electricity supply
So let's say you're a homebuilder, if I tell you I want a new home and I want to live there tomorrow, you can all of a sudden build it in a day, right?
Electricity use is skyrocketing for various reasons, these datacenters being one of them. There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence? No, probably more like supply lagging demand.
Or ASML and Nvidia and all also are incompetent, because they didn't see demand coming....
In the early days of this the AI companies were asking for massive new energy supplies but also refusing to sign contracts to pay for it over the decades of its life.
They're basically attempting to game the system, politically and economically, to put as much of the cost on taxpayers and ratepayers as they can. This naturally slows things down.
ASML and Nvidia did see the demand coming. Intel didnt, theyre incompetent.
> There are a lot of countries struggling to keep up with demand. So incompetence?
Mostly, yea. If the government gets out of the way there are plenty of people who would be happy to supply power in exchange for money. The homebuilding analogy is good because homebuilding in the US often has the same issues that plague the electricity market. There's no reason it should take years to build homes in many parts of this country, but it does.
I'd be curious to hear from the silent down votes. Do you disagree that power companies are effectively regional monopolies? Or do you disagree that government oversight and regulation isn't the reason for poor maintenance and lack of capacity?
These are the same companies and individuals who are actively working to destroy functional government, and are happily looting the US treasury rather than let it be spent on things such as encouraging more energy production.
Have you considered that the march of progress requires human blood to grease the gears and mulched skulls to pave the (highly efficient) road? Really, when you take into account all of the future lives this will improve and save it's difficult to claim any cost now is too high. Would you stand in their way and delay the day that Mythos cures cancer?
I wonder what percentage of GDP expenditure will give us SkyNet.
Undoubtedly, it will find cures to all cancers… The ARR and stock appreciation will be amazing. Except the cures will be found long after it has wiped out all humans.
I'm not saying human blood and mulched skulls are a renewable source of power, I'm just saying. Or maybe they can partner with SoulCycle to power computation with 24/7 spin classes?
If it was indeed the original script, the reason they changed to batteries is maybe not because "some exec" is an idiot, but because it worked better from a storytelling perspective.
Even if treating people as batteries doesn't make much sense as we are pretty terrible power plants, the message is clear and impactful. It is common for movies to oversimplify things, because they want to avoid having the viewer from being distracted from the main plot. It is tricky, as being too obviously wrong can breaks the immersion. I think the people = batteries analogy is a good compromise. Brains = computers, while technically more plausible would add a layer of complexity that could be a bit too much for a 2h action movie.
I don't think it'd have much of an effect on the story, outside of background stuff like the Animatrix, it's just an interesting little fact about why the world is the way it is. Shooting and hitting things in slo mo is still the core either way.
I'm going to bet it's simpler than that. I'm betting they changed the script for the Duracell product placement that made an acquaintance of mine a ton of money for pulling it off. Always follow the money.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are already billionaires. That doesn't stop those greedy fucks from stealing everything in their path in the pursuit of money.
Seems like selc's time would be better spent trying to close the loophole that allows for unpermitted turbine generators instead of going after one company for doing what they were allowed to do when they did it.
its only a expensive to viable alternatives, is there a viable alternative for 1 terrawatt of compute on earth? how could you get approvals for such a project
xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
> xAI’s turbines produce meaningful local/regional pollution (especially NOx in a vulnerable area) but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
If you shoot someone in the face, it will produce a meaningful increase in local/regional murder, but represent a rounding error nationally and globally.
It doesn’t matter if people have to suddenly live by gas turbines that run 24/7 because why again? Can you repeat that last part back to me but say it a little dumber for me?
What's the tremendous externality of gas generators? People heat their own homes with natural gas and it's no big deal. How can a datacenter that is miles away be worse than that?
Its totally inefficient - burning the same gas in a co-generation plant, ideally combined with district heating, would produce the same amount of pollution and basically make use of all the energy.
Edit: They did it with Colossus and now they're doing the exact same thing with Colossus2. https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...