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[–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

To make AI data centers sustainable with solar and batteries costs about 10% of the price of the base hardware. The AI hype is still insane but we can have a little AI.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    Man I want your supplier for batteries and panels tbh.

    A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW. Costs about 500k. Assuming you live far enough from the equator to have seasons, you'll have about 8 hours of daytime at the worst points of the year (less at my latitude for an example, we get ~6 hour days in the dead of winter, with sun angles below 10 degrees and sunshine available... not every week)

    Even in a slightly less extreme location, You'd be looking at roughly a 100 kW array to fill the battery and power that one server reliably like when there's clouds, about 300 kWh battery capacity to get through long nights. Easily 6 figures total cost, maybe 20-40% of the server itself. This assumes no electricity used for cooling, so it's very much back of the envelope math, reality could be much worse or a tiny bit better depending on your latitude.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago*

    A single DGX B300 that could run Kimi for a few concurrent users, uses 14 kW.

    Huh? 1400 TDP = 1.4 kW. This is official I believe.

    And maybe my sources are off but: "As of July 2026, a single B300 GPU purchased outright runs about $53,000 (Spheron Network, July 5, 2026)" https://tech-insider.org/nvidia-blackwell-gpu-pricing/

    Uh you're right, you need about 4x so 270 kWh over the day, which requires about 270 / 6 * 24 = ~1000kW. With about 175€/kWp panels that is another 175 thousand plus installation. And something like 4000m². But that is all the energy costs for 30 years up front. The bigger constraint is the land use then.

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