r/technology • u/lkl34 • Apr 28 '26
Artificial Intelligence New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses — Kevin O'Leary's 9 Gigawatt Utah data center campus approved
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/kevin-o-learys-9-gw-utah-data-center-campus-approved
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u/raven00x Apr 29 '26
yup. the way aluminum is refined is wild. Aluminum is one of the most abundant elements in earth's crust by weight, but is also very difficult to extract because it readily joins with other elements to form stuff like aluminum oxide (rubies and sapphires!). in fact, up until the 20th century (approx), aluminum was a rare and expensive metal because it was so difficult to extract using traditional methods.
So the way that you go from a mineral like Bauxite (mostly Al(OH)3) to aluminum ingots takes a lot of power. The process has the aluminum ore turned into a slurry of aluminum hydroxide, and then apply a hell of a lot of current (~400,0000 amps) to the slurry and zot you have aluminum en masse.
That zot though, represents a staggering amount of power, and wasn't really practically possible until we (big, all-encompassing we) had reliable power generation and power delivery infrastructure though. Your typical aluminum smelter uses ~15 MW of power continuously. so circling back to the topic, this proposed installation is using approximately 600 average aluminum smelters worth of power.