[ExI] Trump Is Obsessed With Oil, but Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Sent: Saturday, 24 January, 2026 7:07 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [ExI] Trump Is Obsessed With Oil, but Chinese Batteries Will Soon Run the World

On Sat, Jan 24, 2026 at 12:11 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>... Instead of that big plant, imagine creating power for use by a bunch of microprocessors, with steady use, not much variability in power demand, since they are using the power in reading source material and creating AIs, which they do around the clock.

>...Incorrect.  They have periods of idle time, and periods when the most power hungry bits are waiting on other bits.  It takes some power buffering within data centers, and scheduling of jobs (which means deliberately not running full blast), to make it so the grid sees them as mostly baseload demand - and the kind of data center you'd probably wind up with wouldn't have that buffering.  (Just take a look at the architectures in your posts.  You'd spend all the infrastructure you could on maximum chips, with minimum anything else.)

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OK.  So each individual processor has periods of idle time, when it is waiting for data, etc.  But if we have a coupla thousand of them, their idle times would not all be simultaneous.  With that many power hungry processors, it would average out to some fraction of peak use.  So perhaps two thousand high-end processors, each of which peak at 1 kW for a total peak demand of 2kW would draw a mostly steady 1 kW.  Then we need the HVAC infrastructure to draw away a megawatt of heat, which seems to me would be easier to do if the plant is set up on the north slope of Alaska, or the Northwest Territory in Canada along the Arctic Sea.

spike