How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Problem
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The AI industry's insatiable power appetite has sparked a scramble for innovative solutions, with some unexpected players jumping into the fray - like Boom Supersonic, which is attempting to pivot its turbine tech from supersonic jets to data center power. Commenters are divided on Boom's prospects, with some seeing them as a "me-too" company operating on vaporware, while others are clarifying that they're not actually building engines, but rather repurposing old fighter jet engines. As the discussion unfolds, a more nuanced understanding emerges, with some commenters pointing out the potential environmental drawbacks of these new power solutions, such as increased natural gas consumption and carbon emissions. The thread is abuzz with skepticism and insight, highlighting the complexities of addressing the AI industry's power problem.
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What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It’s one of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever they’re doing in public is just PR right now. Until they actually produce something (other than a prototype that doesn’t resemble their production goals using other people’s parts) their PR releases don’t mean a whole lot.
My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”
https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...
Natural Gas supply problem: worsened
Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened
This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.
I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.
https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...
Coal plants are bad.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.
If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.
What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office.
Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use it. Maybe they were more efficient before but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?
Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people that would take other companies 25 people. A new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Which ones?
Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.
> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.
> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.
2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!
3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."
4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria
Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I’ll try to respond.
That said, you’re putting forth your own disingenuous assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected to the grid.
Arguing pedantry about the word efficiency isn’t helpful either. The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that. The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
Disingenuous is acting like this is a permanent solution to the exclusion of others. The whole point is that it gets them started now with portable generation that is efficient.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
It's obvious that you're starting from your conclusion and working backwards, which is probably how your initial comment was full of so much motivated reasoning to begin with.
In your mind, is there any set of negative externalities that would justify not building the data centers, or at least not building them now, or at least not building them now in some areas?
Unnecessarily smug?
Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to be built without much understanding of the public utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this argument.
> The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral timeframe that may or may not exist.
Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.
[That read as snark, didn't it? Sorry. I absolutely, completely, 100% agree with everything you say.]
Not so.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...
And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible. Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use naturally follows the sun anyway.
> And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
Some companies already have more chips than they can feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle part of the night.
haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually quite flexible
The demand for both compute and electricity is higher while people are awake and using them.
The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.
Citation needed.
I think that's most people's assumption. It's not that AI is worthless, but that it's significantly less valuable than investors are betting on.
Have you considered that the industry analysis might be a biased source since they are all in on a economic model that must grow at all costs or it collapses? Do you trust McKinsey consulting because they give industry analysis? Blind trust in these corporate entities is how we get Enron, WorldCom, and an opioid crisis.
But hey, I'm just some asshole on the internet. Carry on.
Assuming a single 1GW the data center runs 24/7 365, it’s consuming 8.76 TwH per year. Only being able to generate $10-$12B in revenue (not profit) per year while consuming as much electricity as the entire state of Hawaii (1.5M people) seems awful.
So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.
It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.
But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?
I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15 seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to type.
Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
> Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in general anything that serves millions of requests in a small footprint is going to look pretty big.
There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...
The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).
Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.
Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth.
That is certainly not a logical leap I'm making. AI doesn't make anybody redundant, the same way mechanized farming didn't. It just frees them up to do more productive things.
Now consider whether LLM's will ultimately speed up the technological advancements necessary to reduce CO2? It's certainly plausible.
Think about how much cloud computing and open sourced changed it so you could launch a startup with 3 engineers instead of 20. What happened? An explosion of startups, since there were so many more engineers to go around. The engineers weren't delivering pizzas instead.
Same thing is happening with anything that needs more art -- the potential for video games here is extraordinary. A trained artist is way more effective leveraging AI and handling 10x the output, as the tools mature. Now you get 10x more video games, or 10x more complex/larger worlds, or whatever it is that the market ends up wanting.
So many people make this mistake when new technologies come out, thinking they'll replace workers. They just make workers more productive. Sometimes people do end up shifting to different fields, but there's so much commercial demand for art assets in so many things, the labor market shrinking is not the case for digital artists right now.
In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.
LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
And then we get this gem...
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.
This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.
I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.
It doesn't matter who they are if there's nothing backing it up.
I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.
So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel. Got it.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.
Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists.
But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?
It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.
Like every other industry in the world?
I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.
> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!
The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.
[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...
[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...
My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.
I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.
Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel electric engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.
On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.
As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending.
xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis
Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.
My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).
Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.
Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.
And there are also decorative and/or supplemental gas heating devices which exhaust into the home.
Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.
You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.
it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor "simple" LNG burners/heaters.
I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
*greed.
We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is anything but a distribution of income problem.
wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it.
This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
That said, it is all pretty impressive.
It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created:
> AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
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