Several Mississippi homes have been purchased near datacenters and one resident said realtor outlined target to buy more than 400
People in a Mississippi neighborhood, many of whom dislike a nearby power plant central to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions, have received a stark offer – to sell their houses to his company and make way.
Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI, Musk’s AI company that was folded into the SpaceX entity in February, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agree to not join a lawsuit against the company over the power plant’s noise.
This plan could potentially swallow up almost the entire neighborhood of Colonial Hills, on the western flank of Southaven. A realtor told one resident there is a target to purchase 418 homes, with 18 homeowners already agreeing to sell, according to a recording of a conversation heard by the Guardian. xAI did not respond to questions over these numbers and its plans for the neighborhood and has previously said it intends to be be a good neighbor; it denies all claims in the noise lawsuit.
Building solar farms and batteries to make these massive DCs fully renewable isnt practical unfortunately.
We’re talking bigger than the biggest one ever made in the USA by multiples to keep the power on 24/7, the size of Austin and maybe bigger, with a battery farm dwarfing even that in scale (not land size, but ever built).
They should still try to make as much of it solar, but ultimately its going to need a grid connect or alternative source at the same power for when the sun is down as these things always run near peak.
Edit: this is really what nuclear is perfect for. Constant high baseload.
Edit: limiting peak loads to sun times could help, but something like that would require legislation as thats downtime on deprecating hardware.
It’s practical, and much cheaper/quicker power, but they need to move further out, and lose the water supply for “modern” datacenters, and fiber connections require longer lines. Using more land solves all noise issues for any neighbours as well.
See, you don’t really get the scale. It’s not practical, the land size where it needs to be would be immense, and all the numbers below get worse as you go north. This would be around Texas.
These things would need to run in the winter when the output is worst. You would need approximately 7GW of solar to power a 1GW datacenter and charge the batteries to run on off sun hours. That battery would need to be 16 GWh.
Except, that’s perfect winter weather. It’s not always perfect winter weather, it needs a buffer, likely at least 1+ day of buffer for when there is no sun, so thats another 24GWh of battery, and that 24GWh of battery needs another 7-10GW of solar to keep it topped up appropriately.
So
23-2614-17 GW of solar and 40GWh of battery and you can have some bad solar days with a complete 1 day backup if everything is taken offline, but you really think they would build something like this completely off grid that only has 1 day of backup?That’s 14-16 times the largest solar field active in the USA today, and 13 times the largest battery.
Getting all that space, permitting it all etc would take years on it’s own.
Thats why they’re all doing gas turbines. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like it, but it’s definitely easier and quicker than something on the scale what would be required with solar. Long term yes the solar/batteries would be cheaper.
Edit: i fail at addition and addrd storage and solar for the solar. 7GW + 7-10GW is not 23 to 26. So itd be 14 to 17x not 23-26x.