Well Elon really worked hard to get that done. Campaigning for the guy who is cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant.
Most people aren't programming or operating heavy machinery at 4AM, either. Most power is consumed in the day, and most AI will be leveraged in the day.
(1) the utilization factor over the obsolescence-limited "useful" life of the hardware;
(2) the short-term (sub-month) training job scheduling onto a physical cluster.
For (1) it's acceptable to, on average, not operate one month per year as long as that makes the electricity opex low enough.
For (2) yeah, large-scale pre-training jobs that spend millions of compute on what's overall "one single" job, those are often ok to wait a few days to a very few weeks as would be from just dropping HPC cluster system operation to standby power/deep sleep on the p10 worst days each year as far as renewable yield in the grid-capacity-limited surroundings of the datacenter goes.
And if you can further run systems a little power-tuned rather than performance-tuned when power is less plentiful, to where you may average only 90% theoretical compute throughput during cluster operating hours (this is in addition to turning it off for about a month worth of time), you could reduce power production and storage capacity a good chunk further.
China controls 80% of the supply chain for solar and has most of the rare earth magnets needed for wind. Since China is America’s bugbear and containing China’s influence is a bipartisan issue, this was a likely outcome whoever is in office
We don't have to guess what the most likely outcome might have been, someone else was in office 7 months ago so we can just look at what they were doing.
Were they "cancelling in-progress solar and wind projects and claiming the feds will never approve another green energy plant"? That's the "likely outcome" we're discussing.
Yes, the US has been scaling back on China-sourced renewable energy supply chains since 2023 at least, with tariffs and by removing incentives
Not exactly your wording at that time, but my point still stands that the outcome was going to be the same because the imports were heavily skewed towards China. This has all been in motion before this current admin
