News NVIDIA and Intel to Develop AI Infrastructure and Personal Computing Products

[coercitiv]

In NYC, there are gas powered power plants right in the middle of the city, and they don't seem to be the problem.

Or the "problem" in Memphis is manufactured, to create political propaganda...

My understanding is power plants use complex air filtering installations to meet environmental regulations. I doubt the turbines fall under the same rules and regulations, they are meant to be compact, temporary generators. They're probably not meant o be used in great numbers in a single location either.

I did a quick search in the article linked above, and it seems this would indeed be the case:

The turbines are only temporary and don’t require federal permits for their emissions of NOx and other hazardous air pollutants like formaldehyde, xAI’s environmental consultant, Shannon Lynn, said during a webinar hosted by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The argument appears to rely on a loophole in federal regulations that environmental groups and former EPA officials say shouldn’t apply to the situation.

 

[Joe NYC]

My understanding is power plants use complex air filtering installations to meet environmental regulations. I doubt the turbines fall under the same rules and regulations, they are meant to be compact, temporary generators. They're probably not meant o be used in great numbers in a single location either.

I did a quick search in the article linked above, and it seems this would indeed be the case:

The distances in Memphis are much greater too. For example, I have a gas powered power plant just a block and 1/2 away from my house. Lots of expensive high rise buildings within 2 block radius.. But a tall smoke stack puts the emissions at much higher elevation from the ground, and still likely has the best filtering installation.

BTW, I think I read somewhere that Musk bough out all these turbines from the entire country... So this was a one time fix, and the country is back into the same pickle of not having enough power generation.

And just a few years ago, Democrat governors, under cover of Covid, were shutting down nuclear power-plants. "Never let the crises go to waste" is the motto.

The gas powered power plant used to be just for peak electricity usage, but now without nuclear power plant, that used to provide substantial percentage of power to NYC, it is probably running around the clock. That was at the highest point of the "environmental" derangement / hysteria. In the US, but still going in Germany, and what most people are not aware - Taiwan.

They are also paving farmland with solar panels in NY state, paid by some fake Private Equity powered by tax breaks as much as the Sun.

Also interesting how quickly things change. Just 5 years after they were shutting down nuclear power plants, and now, the new governor of NY state (also a Democrat) is exploring possibility of building new nuclear power plants in the state.

Nuclear power plants can operate up to 80 years, while politicians can change their minds every 5 years...

 

[LightningZ71]

I thought that I read that 3 mile island was getting partially restarted for a data center.

 

[Joe NYC]

I thought that I read that 3 mile island was getting partially restarted for a data center.

I think you are right, one of the hyperscalers is planning to restart it, I forget which one.

The nuclear power plant near NYC, called Indian Point, that was forced to shut down by politicians, now is looking at feasibility of restarting it as well. One of the obstacles is that the politicians rushed the decommissioning, damaging / destroying parts of the plan, which can still be undone and rebuilt, but now it would take years to do so.

They are instead exploring building latest generation new nuclear plants in Upstate New York, which is probably a better long term decision from the current sad state.

Upstate New York is, BTW also location of upcoming Micron mega fab and New York is also home of former AMD and current Global Foundries fab.

Ground breaking of the new Micron fab should come shortly, and the first phase of the fab complex will be Phase 1 with about $20 billion investment. Total project cost could be $100 billion over number of years.

 

[Doug S]

Maybe they just need to add a taller chimney - smokestack.

In NYC, there are gas powered power plants right in the middle of the city, and they don't seem to be the problem.

Or the "problem" in Memphis is manufactured, to create political propaganda...

There is a lot of evidence now that emissions from natural gas plants has some fairly serious health consequences for those located nearby. We didn't know all those details when they began replacing the more visibly dirty coal plants (which are also unhealthy, but in a different way)

And as mentioned, Musk's were completely unregulated since they were "temporary". I expect a lot of AI datacenters are going to use similar loopholes in locales that allow them to get away with it like Memphis did, because getting enough utility power generated & routed to all the datacenters on the drawing board in the time they're targeting to go operational is just not possible.

There's a dispute going on around where I live, where the utility wants to build a new natural gas plant. The airport doesn't want it because on cold days it could cause problems with visibility for flights landing from that direction. The residents are organizing against it because they say the site the utility is looking at is too close to a newly built school and they are concerned over the health effects for their children being in proximity to it 1000 hours a year.

 

[coercitiv]

BTW, I think I read somewhere that Musk bough out all these turbines from the entire country... So this was a one time fix

I doubt it's a one time fix.

Memphis and Tennessee have been getting a lot of pushback, so xAI’s genius move was to develop a Gigawatt-scale energy hub right across the border in Southaven, Mississippi. In mid-2025, the company acquired a former Duke Energy power plant in Southaven. Shortly after, Mississippi regulators granted xAI temporary approval to run gas turbines there for up to 12 months without a permit.

Source.

I think they'll keep using them indefinitely, since whatever new power capacity they build will stay behind the ever increasing needs in this race. Maybe they'll shuffle them around as people complain, but I expect their number and usage to increase. That Southaven location is right next to residential areas so I guess we'll find out soon enough if the problem in Memphis was political.

 

[Joe NYC]

I doubt it's a one time fix.

I meant one time fix in a different sense - as one time fix to the lack of power generation capacity in the US.

If Musk bought out the entire stock of these turbines, it may take several years to manufacture more turbines, to replenish the stock, for the next company to do use the same trick.

 

[LightningZ71]

Our regional scandal is a new Meta DC being built upstate. There's nowhere near enough base capacity for 9 months out of the year in the regional power company and transmission in the area is paltry. The solution they came up with was to "influence" the power company to have multiple natural gas base load turbines built near the DC but pay for it by charging everyone else in the region for the massive costs by nearly doubling their electric bills. Oh, and the state "influenced" Meta into coming and creating a handful of permanent jobs for locals (which they aren't obligated to keep more than a short time) by waiving most to all of their property taxes.

 

[marees]

Our regional scandal is a new Meta DC being built upstate. There's nowhere near enough base capacity for 9 months out of the year in the regional power company and transmission in the area is paltry. The solution they came up with was to "influence" the power company to have multiple natural gas base load turbines built near the DC but pay for it by charging everyone else in the region for the massive costs by nearly doubling their electric bills. Oh, and the state "influenced" Meta into coming and creating a handful of permanent jobs for locals (which they aren't obligated to keep more than a short time) by waiving most to all of their property taxes.

Apparently China has 100% reserve energy capacity

They invest a lot in capacity & that puts the companies under govt control (rather than shareholder/ profit driven model here)

 

[Doug S]

by waiving most to all of their property taxes.

I have long said there needs to be a federal law banning states and municipalities from dangling tax breaks or giving outright handouts to influence the business decisions like where to locate datacenters, where to build sports stadiums, and so forth. If the project doesn't work on its own merit, then it shouldn't be done. The taxpayers shouldn't subsidize projects that were already going to be done just to influence where they are located, and shouldn't shoulder the risk of projects that would never have been done without the subsidy for wildly overblown claims of benefit to the local economy. Even if those benefits materialize, they are typically concentrated in the pockets of a few, and there's tremendous opportunity for grift and corruption in decisions like location - if I own some land in a potential location and am connected to or able to "influence" those in charge of offering subsidies, I could insure my location was subsidized while locations owned by others are not.

Smaller cities will see smaller scale corruption like offering property tax abatements (charging at the "old" rate not counting the improvements for 10 or 20 years) to induce retailers to move a few miles into their city limits to collect the local option sales tax, to giving handouts to big developers for new construction that smaller less connected ones can't get, to offering deals for businesses to locate in a certain area the city wants to encourage development in giving them an advantage over their competition who had to take the full risk in the past to open in another location. All of these happened where I live. People in bigger cities see hundreds of millions of tax dollars going to build stadiums for billionaire pro sports owners. People everyone see datacenters getting preferential treatment while everyone in the area pays for it with higher electricity pricing. Or heck just look at the super corrupt Foxconn deal in Wisconsin in 2018 or whenever that was, that was probably the all time record bad example.

AI is just supercharging the corruption, and outside of the initial construction provides few jobs and because there are so few people working on site contributes almost nothing to the surrounding community as far as restaurants, retail and so forth. Because the needs of AI are growing so fast as far as power (Nvidia estimates 1 MEGAWATT racks by the end of the decade!) a lot of current datacenters will be functionally obsolete, and a blight on the community.

 

[gdansk]

I have long said there needs to be a federal law banning states and municipalities from dangling tax breaks or giving outright handouts

With NAFTA, and other trade agreements, it needs to be federal law across all member countries.
Otherwise "capital investment" will flow to wherever such incentives are not banned.
With data centers for AI, where 10ms latency isn't a big deal, there isn't much to stop them being constructed wherever (in long enough time scale).

It's basically an impossible ask, even if you are correct that these incentives are overwhelmingly negative.

 

[Joe NYC]

Apparently China has 100% reserve energy capacity

They invest a lot in capacity & that puts the companies under govt control (rather than shareholder/ profit driven model here)

China has so much solar capacity from their deserts that they don't have capacity in their grid to take advantage of.

Which, IMO, points to the only solution for the AI companies to set up their datacenters in China or let Chinese AI companies surpass them. Which would also have bad repercussions on US AI hardware companies (NVidia, AMD).

"Energy conservation" has always been a retarded idea, but (very slowly), more and more people are starting to realize it. Conserve something that is unlimited, infinite in universe. Only a very small brain would think this was a good idea.

 

[Geddagod]

I want to drop a bomb as well

Spoiler: leak

View attachment 130513

I saw this on twitter, didnt realize u were the source haha great stuff
Super duper bullish on 18A low power perf/watt. The PTL Fmax leaks aren't kind, but honestly Fmax is less important atp than perf/watt at ULP for Intel, esp for both mobile and server products.

 

[511]

I saw this on twitter, didnt realize u were the source haha great stuff
Super duper bullish on 18A low power perf/watt. The PTL Fmax leaks aren't kind, but honestly Fmax is less important atp than perf/watt at ULP for Intel, esp for both mobile and server products.

apparently @gdansk photoshopped image got better pr than me 🤣 🤣

 

[regen1]

Super duper bullish on 18A low power perf/watt. The PTL Fmax leaks aren't kind, but honestly Fmax is less important atp than perf/watt at ULP for Intel, esp for both mobile and server products.

PTL's F-max might be somewhat similar to LunarLake's F-max (at least the initial released SKUs i.e. if they don't do some newer stepping down the line).
Expecting improvements in base-clocks, plus the extra 4*LPE cores should result in better Multi-threaded performance than ARL-H.
The cores and NPU(vs LNL's NPU) are supposedly smaller.
Some of which might indicate PTL being more focused on Perf/W than outright performance or F-max.

 

[gdansk]

apparently @gdansk photoshopped image got better pr than me 🤣 🤣

did I miss something?

 

[511]

did I miss something?

Remember the modification you did to the wcl leak it got viral on Twitter 🤣

 

[gdansk]

Remember the modification you did to the wcl leak it got viral on Twitter 🤣

That's unfortunate. It was merely an example of how you can draw any line you want.

 

[511]

That's unfortunate. It was merely an example of how you can draw any line you want.

I didn't draw those though only you get to drew that I only hid stuff 😜

 

[Schmide]

I didn't draw those though only you get to drew that I only hid stuff 😜

That's called entrapment.

 

[Meteor Late]

I want to drop a bomb as well

Spoiler: leak

View attachment 130513

Yep it's a dud, look at the curve shape, LNL has much more potential to get more performance at hhigher power levels. The graph shows it won't be any impressive at 15-20W single core.

 

[511]

Yep it's a dud, look at the curve shape, LNL has much more potential to get more performance at hhigher power levels. The graph shows it won't be any impressive at 15-20W single core.

Lmfao just for reference LNL vs MTL

 

[DKR]

Remember the modification you did to the wcl leak it got viral on Twitter 🤣

🤣 I didn't know it was from you in this thread!

 

[Thunder 57]

Too bad they aren't spending that $100 billion on Fusion or something.

I hear fusion is only 20 years away .

 

[DavidC1]

They need to switch to Thorium power plants. Uranium is partially used because they want dual use for military, which is asinine because it's basically promoting extinction. So plan to decomissioning all existing plants for thorium ones.

By the way, Nuclear isn't completely clean. Regular operation itself slowly leaks radiation around the environment. It doesn't need 3-mile island or Chernobyl to do so.

Also, if it results in electric costs for average people, there should be curbing on datacenters. Priorities are really screwed up in countries where everything is comfortable and cushy like West.