Well, Davies has a point, communicating scale is the difficult part.
So, for those familiar with computers, think Scott this:
A typical Word doc or PDF is several hundred KB's (kilobyte =1000 bytes) to 1MB (Megabyte 1m bytes) a jpg picture your phone takes, is 3-4MB. A full HD movie streamed online will be about 9GB (Gigabyte =1b bytes) of data. Obviously a movie is thousands of "images" stitched together so is file size with be significantly more. The same goes for that energy usage.
Similarly, Homes are measured in kW usage (technically usage per hour or kWh) on a monthly basis. You might use ~800-1,000kWh per month, maybe 10,000-11,000kWh a year. But let's call it 1000kW are used, so 1mW or 1 megawatt. This data center would need at least 9,000x more energy per month as it's gW scale, not mW or even kW... Plus, its power plant will be close by, so you're creating heat and pollution to make the 9+gW energy and then USING up that energy and dumping 8+gW of heat, so his example calculated 16gW of heat being generated... That's the equivalent of a good 16k homes, or ~60,000 people use.
THE KICKER that's just to run the data center, think of the demand for the HVAC and ecological damage to using a lake's water to cool equipment (water would be coming out over 100⁰F)..
Fuck AI!