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.

      • taxon@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        “I always figured that the word “Jigawatt”was made up just for the movie and meant to sound like a really large amount. It wasn’t unit I started researching this flux capacitor replica project that I stumbled across a few references to the actual term. It turns out that the original pronunciation of “Giga” was with the “j” sound (really a soft “g”).” Here Check out Merriam Webster’s pronunciation

        • neclimdul@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Yeah pretty neat. I spelled it out because I doubt many people in this day and age would pronounce it that way normally.