In TechRadar

in TechRadar  

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.

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Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at data centers around the world.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.

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In one segment of the keynote, Huang talked about the potential for Nvidia ACE to power 'digital humans' that companies can use to serve as customer service agents, be the face of an interior design project, and more. This makes absolute sense, since who are we kidding, Nvidia ACE for video games won't really make all that much money.

However, if a company wants to fire 90% of its customer service staff and replace it with an Nvidia ACE-powered avatar that never sleeps, never eats, never complains about low pay or poor working conditions, and can be licensed for a fee that is lower than the cost of the labor it is replacing, well, I don't have to tell you how that is going to go.

via Gerry McGovern