This asinine and misguided project needs to be stopped right now. I'm tired of headlines talking about it as if A anyone wants it other than the billionaires and B it's remotely reasonable even if people did want it.

Don't worry, it won't get built, just like most other AI datacenters that have been announced.

God damn, as a Canadian, im sorry for the existence of Kevin. He is an absolute failure of a human being.

Ahh, the waste heat of 23 atom bombs. A standard unit for sure.

Mfs proposing data centers in deserts

The funniest part is how obviously this is a pump and dump. There's no fucking way this guy has $500B+ to blow on this shit, and banks aren't gonna give it to him because they're already choking on the debt they have. At best he'll rob a few investors blind, but there's no fucking way this gets built. Ever.

These headlines are getting truly hysterical.

Waste heat and electricity usage are the same. Atom bombs are not SI units.

It ain't happenin'. They say it'll cost "over $1 billion." Yeah, no shit. That's technically true but also meaningless. It would cost many billions of dollars, many more billions than Kevin O'Leary would ever be able to acquire. It's nonsense, he's not a serious person and we shouldn't take anything he says seriously. He also said he was going to build a massive oil refinery in the US a few years ago. Never happened. Never gonna happen.

The only reason O'Leary ever had any money at all is because he sold the Learning Company to Mattel around the turn of the century for a lot of money. It was the worst financial decision Mattel ever made, and one of the worst financial decisions any company has ever made in the history of business. Mattel ended up taking a huge loss as a result of the acquisition but O'Leary got paid. He's a terrible business person, none of his business ventures have ever been successful. He's a charlatan.

Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system

Incidentally, tnt is about a tenth the energy density of the densest hydrocarbons, so this should take at least 30 thousand tons of oil or gas per day. And emit CO₂ on that scale. Probably more.

That's nothing compared to the 40GW ludicrousscale datacenter I'm proposing. To put it into perspective: that's more than 4 O'Learycenters. Now, who wants in? 😎

Due to paywall unfortunately not able to read the article. As someone who works with energy production, having "waste heat of 23 atom bombs a day" is incredible stupid and practically misinformation way of describing the energy amount.

I assume that they used that 9GW as heat energy output, which would be 24h x 9GWh in a day. That is in a day same amount of 23 x 1 kiloton nuke. But even these are same units, they really aren't comparable. Another is milliseconds, another is full day.

Yes, venting that amount of energy to waste is insanely stupid, because it should be used to something useful. That amount of heat could be used to heat cities in colder climates (northern US states/Canada/northern Europe etc).

Unfortunately US/Canada doesn't do district heating networks like we do here in Nordics. You distribute gas to homes, we distribute hot water. That hot water can be directly taken from any waste heat source.

Microsoft's new Espoo data center is going to heat up 60% of one of the largest cities in Finland. This is the only way these data centers make any sense to build. Other ways to do it is just financially and ecologically stupid.