Taiwan's Big Computex Trade Show "I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold" (NVDA)
Mr. Huang was yesterday's keynote speaker and as the company did for the GPU get-together in March, they had a slew of announcements timed to coincide with the talk. and as with the March event it takes a while to absorb it all and since Computex is going to run through June 7 we'll start of with a little divertissement.
From TechRadar, June 3:
Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good.
I don't think Nvidia
CEO Jensen Huang is a bad guy, or that he has nefarious plans for
Nvidia, but the most consequential villains in history are rarely evil.
They just go down a terribly wrong path, and end up leaving totally
forseeable, but ultimately inevitable ruin in their wake.
While
the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia's latest
data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they
can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that
Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All
of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its
shareholders, and while I don't give financial advice, I can say that if
you're an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thilled by Sunday's
keynote presentation.
For everyone else, however, all I saw was
the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of
people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely
massive disruption to the global workforce that 'digital humans' are
likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers
capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization
rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live —
and a great many will die before the end — in the world these
technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any
of us.
The fact that Jensen Huang treated the GeForce graphics
card, the product that defined Nvidia for two decades and set it up for
the success it currently enjoys, with such dismissiveness and disregard
was ultimately just the icing on a very ugly cake.
Nvidia Blackwell is nothing short of a doomsday device
It even looks like a damned skull! (Image credit: Nvidia)
There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic.
Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down
15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's
1,875 watts per GPU.
The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw
up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power
consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of
control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an
uncontained wildfire.
Worse still, Huang said that in the future,
he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at
data centers around the world.
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One
million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts
of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1
gigawatt of power.
Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil,
produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the
time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not
all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting
sources.
I always feared that the AI data center boom was likely
going to make the looming climate catastrophe inevitable, but there was
something about seeing it all presented on a platter with a smile and an
excited presentation that struck me as more than just tone-deaf. It was
damn near revolting.
