this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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[–] cogitase@lemmy.dbzer0.com 59 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It's in one of the sunniest places in the US too. 6.0 kWh/m²/day of solar irradiance. There's even already a relatively large solar farm in the same county.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 78 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Wait, it does not run on solar, even partially? JFC.

edit: yep.

Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.

It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

🤦

Does greed know no end in this country?

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

It‘s universally known by now that new mega data centers are generally powered by gas. And it‘s the same everywhere in the world. Destroying them and prohibit exorbitant wealth are measures that are long overdue already. We genuinely do not need all that calculating power. Not for this high of a price.

[–] A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip 1 points 7 hours ago

No, we really don't.

[–] turdburglar@piefed.social 17 points 1 day ago

it does know an end. in fact, the end just pled guilty to stalking ending in death in new york.

[–] dan1101@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If I were king they could run data centers with solar and fans. No outside power, no outside water.

[–] CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 47 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

You realize they are for sifting through the massive amount of surveillance data using AI right? They aren’t for ChatGPT. They are for categorizing and watching every person on the planet 1984 style.

[–] IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (2 children)

that's my biggest worry, more data centers won't lower the cost of LLM tokens.

The only reason they want so much compute power is to have AI agents watching and annotating everything flock cameras see.

not just license plate readers (a raspberry pi could handle that). but everything.

My paranoia is that in 5 years, if you protest, the police will come to arrest you with a long list of every "crime" you have committed: driving holding you phone, no seatbelt, a recipt flew out of your pockets... a long list of petty meaningless violations.

and they'll have that list for everyone.

[–] morto@piefed.social 1 points 15 hours ago

Just imagine the number of misclassifications...

[–] willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

They are already unpopular now. Wait till the pigs dive even deeper in popularity.

They might convince the general population that the first amendment is not worth exercising, and instead we all neet to contemplate military style resistance.

Nobody apparently wants to bring trouble to themselves as long as there is still anything left to hope for. However that calculus can change once the powers that be engineer a life even more glaringly worthless than it already is. Lots of people are quiet quitting or not having children already. That trend will accelerate even further.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 1 points 19 hours ago

If ice killing random people on the street, on camera, multiple times, didn't cross that line, a random construction site won't do shit.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (4 children)

This thing is 7.65GW. The largest solar array in the US is 900MW and uses 4600-5000 acres. The scale to do this on solar alone is bonkers, but not impossible.

You would need to at least 4x provision it which means a 30GW solar array, and 156,000 acres, before getting into battery storage for non sunny times.

It'd be nice to use some solar absolutely, but this is better suited to nuclear.

Edit: And if you aren't storing / over provision to store, then you still need the peak output from another source anyway and these things likely always run near peak as they are constantly in use, so the size of the non-solar source doesn't reduce, only its output during the sunny day time hours. So you end up with 7.65GW of natural gas still, but maybe they also build a 1GW solar farm on the side.

[–] wewbull@feddit.uk 1 points 6 hours ago

So don't build it. It needs too much power.

[–] VAK@lemmy.world 1 points 8 hours ago

Maybe Trump and Denmark can cover the ice in Greenland with solar cells. That's about 434,000,000 acres

[–] postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 7 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Nuclear power run by a publicly traded company worries me.

Because there will be shareholder value vs. safety trades.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Probably shouldn't be run by them i agree, but they could fund it and go into some agreement to purchase its power.

[–] cantstopthesignal@sh.itjust.works 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

At that scale you aren't using batteries, you are pumping water into a hydroelectric dam.

[–] NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

At this scale everything is bonkers. The hoover damn is 2GW.

That severely limits where you can place it, probably more than solar. Now you need all that extra water, and height differential that can be at that scale.