I have no idea how they are powering it, but with the speed with which solar and battery prices are falling, and the slowness of getting a new big grid interconnection, I would not be surprised to see new data centers that are primarily powered by their own solar+batteries. Perhaps with a small, fast and cheap grid connection for small bits of backup.
If not this year, definitely in the 2030s.
Edit: for a much smaller scale version of this, here's a titanium plant doing this, instead of a data center. The nice thing about renewables is that they easily scale; if you can do it for 50MW you can do it for 500MW or 5GW with a linear increase in the resources. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-industry/in-a-fir...
Why not? A typical value for land is 10 acres/MW, so 15-30 sq mi for 1-2 GW, which will average out to hundreds of megawatts over the course of 24 hours, even in shady days.
Including land costs, solar is the cheapest source of energy, at <$1/W, which is a tiny fraction of the cost of the rest of the data center equipment, and has a 30-50 year lifetime. For less than $5B you could have hundreds of megawatts of continuous solar power backed by 24+ hours (5+GWh) of batteries. Hydro storage really can't compete with batteries for this sort of application, at least for new storage capacity. Existing hydro certainly is great, just building new stuff is hard.
And GW-scale solar installations are fairly commonplace. Far easier to procure than a matching number of H100s.
Maybe it's possible, I haven't seen it done yet. I guess there were better alternatives.
Well, I can't share numbers about datacenter MW sizes... the fact that I misread some of those numbers as per datacenter MW is telling :0
In any case, Meta (not my employer) has 24k GPU clusters. In the most dense (and less power hungry) setup, Nvidia superpods have 4x DGX per rack, 8 GPU per DGX (hyperscaler use HGX to build their stuff, but it's the same), and each rack uses ~40kW. That's 750 racks and 30MW of just ML, you need to add some 10-20% for supporting compute&storage, and other DC infrastructure (cooling, etc.).
24k GPU is likely one building, or even just one floor. Meta will likely have multiple clusters like that in the same POP.
That's in the ballpark of 100+MW per datacenter, as the starting point.
Oh I don't dispute your hundreds of MW at all. Other freely available information definitely supports that for the hypescalers. Browsing recent construction projects, I see 250,000 sq ft projects from Apple, and 700,000+ from the hyperscalers, and typically consumption is 150-300W/sqft, with the hyper dense DGX systems at that or above.
There are lots of large scale renewable power projects out there waiting to get onto the grid, stuck in long interconnection queues, more than 1TW projects last I heard. There are also lots of data centers wanting to get big power connections, enough that utilities are able to scare their regulatory bodies to make bad short-term decisions to try to support the new load centers.
Connecting the builders of these large projects directly to the new demand, and going outside the slow, corrupt, and inept utilities would solve a lot of problems. And you could still eventually get that big interconnection to the grid installed, and in the interim 3-5 years, power the data center mostly off-grid. Because that massive battery plus solar resource would eventually be a massive grid asset that could benefit everyone too, if the utilities weren't so slow.
Assuming no hydro-electric: at night with no wind you'd need to draw the same 100('s) of MW from batteries (or use gas/coal/nuclear which defeats the purpose of ALSO using renewables on top of that 100 percent backup capacity).
Batteries with that capacity are still extremely expensive (and massive in volume) which would essentially mean your energy price is 5 to 10x higher (ballpark rough estimate) than non-renewable continious sources.
Not to mention the huge amount of land needed/wasted (costs money), there's a recycling problem (solar panels are not actually sustainable in the sense that they'll last forever or can be recycled) and so on.
The only company in the world for which I could see that setup MAYBE make sense business-wise is Tesla/xAI: they could relatively quickly and cheaply roll-out massive battery storage, data center and solar (for example). If only to be slightly faster and bigger at rolling out than their competitors it could make sense from a business perspective. But that's only because they can produce massive battery capacity at the lowest possible cost and quickest turn-around.
I think your talking points are mostly put of date or incorrect.
First, batteries are cheap today and being installed on grids at fantastic scales all the time. I suggested 5GWh of batteries above, which at that scale could probably be delivered at $300/kWh installed in a 2024 project. (Back in 2022, that figure was a $481/kWh and price competition has been brutal since then, see figure 3 [1]) At 6000 cycles of lifetime, the cost of delivering a stored a kWh is only $0.05, less than typical transmission and distribution charges.
Second, solar is cheap, and that includes the land costs, at $0.04/kWh unsubsidized (slide 31 [2]). Land producing valuable electricity is now wasted, it's the exact opposite of waste. Solar is recyclable, as a simple web search will show. Further to say that solar is somehow "not sustainable" is just bad propaganda on a massive scale.
There are 571GW of solar+battery projects seeking connection on the grid. [3] Very few of those projects are planning on using Tesla's storage. Now, all of those projects are going to have vastly smaller batteries, but scaling up the battery to cover for 24hour power is an easy design change, especially if it helps the project start generating money years faster than it would if it had to wait for an interconnection. A new data center could partner on site as the off-take for one of these hundreds of proposed projects, if it's close enough to the data center resources. NC would be a likely site.
Well, I do not know if I have convinced you it's a good idea, but I have definitely gained a lot of conviction for myself that it's a fantastic business idea for both the power project and the data center... now if only I had serious skin in the game on either side so that I could benefit from it!
I don't know what the power consumption of an individual data center is, but your link talks about the consumption of all datacenters in individual states/countries.
A couple hundred megawatts is what I would expect from a data center, and had planned out before commenting, so that's on the mark. An H100 is very roughly a kW after adding in all the rest of the overhead, so a 200MW data center would have 200,000 H100s. That's massive cluster, but not inconceivable.
If not this year, definitely in the 2030s.
Edit: for a much smaller scale version of this, here's a titanium plant doing this, instead of a data center. The nice thing about renewables is that they easily scale; if you can do it for 50MW you can do it for 500MW or 5GW with a linear increase in the resources. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-industry/in-a-fir...