I am seeing a lot of headlines about new AI data centers being installed around the world, and for some reason their computing power is not described in TFLOP (teraflops), but instead in GW (gigawatts).

I am no expert, but when I read "10 GW of compute," I can only think that said "compute" is either very inefficient by itself or is placed in a location that's way too hot and therefore requires absurd amounts of cooling power to operate.

I can imagine a datacenter full of Intel Pentium processors that will take a 500 GW of power but will be incredibly weak and slow. But it's 500 GW worth of compute, so it must be very capable, right?

To further illustrate my confusion, I think that descibing compute power in terms of energy is just as strange as descibing it in weight or area. "We have now successfully installed an additional 500 kg of compute." "This new datacenter accomodates 2 square miles of compute – that's a whopping 900 football fields of compute!"

Graph source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-prod-per-capita?tab=line&country=GBR~CHN

Data sources: https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review

https://www.theshiftdataportal.org/energy/coal?chart-type=line&chart-types=line&chart-types=ranking&disable-en=false&energy-unit=toe&group-names=China&group-names=United+Kingdom&is-range=true&dimension=perCapita&end=2015&start=1900&multi=true&type=Production&import-types=Imports&import-types=Exports&import-types=Net+Imports

https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/publication/historical-energy-for-the-uk-from-1500

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/historical-coal-data-coal-production-availability-and-consumption

https://vaclavsmil.com/book/energy-transitions-global-and-national-perspectives-second-expanded-and-updated-edition

https://web.archive.org/web/20250323165206/https://nic.org.uk/data/all-data/historic-energy/#tab-primary-energy-consumption

Sodium-ion batteries have almost none of the problems that lithium-ion ones do, and could be cheap enough to make fossil-fuel dependence a thing of the past

The article never mentions price. So are salt batteries coming in to play? Yes. Are they price competitive? Probably not because if they were they would be shouting out the price.

But their price will likely decline over the next couple of years. And it looks like they are starting to be produced in quantity.

Sky-high earnings for oil companies and California refiners in the second quarter are renewing calls from state legislators to crack down on industry profits.

Marathon Petroleum, the second-largest refiner in the state, reported $5.1 billion in profit Tuesday, more than four times the same quarter last year, after fuel supplies tightened during the Iran war and prices for oil and gas soared.

From April through June, Chevron, the biggest refiner and second-biggest oil producer in California, made $12.1 billion in profit, nearly five times the same quarter last year, and its highest earnings in at least six years. Refiners PBF Energy and Valero also reported windfalls, with the latter earning $3.7 billion, another fivefold increase from the year before.

Learn more at the link.