These “makeshift” structures are housing hardware that costs millions of dollars in total.
“Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called “rapid deployment structures,” is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They’re certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the “classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock” situation.”
Uses jet engines for power?
Welp. Guess we know what happened to the old Spirit Airlines fleet.
It’s pretty common for natural gas electric plants to use Brayton cycle turbines, which is the same thermodynamic cycle that the turbojet engines on airplanes use. But you can optimize the designs on the ground for efficiency (and zero thrust) instead of thrust-to-weight.
It’s also common to use “combined cycle” technology which mashes the Brayton cycle engine together with an older-style steam loop for extra efficiency.
After reading the article, I think they’re just saying they installed some miniaturized natural gas plants. I don’t think they’re literally running aircraft engines on the ground.
There’s at least one company that does tweak (iirc used) airliner turbofans by taking the fan part off so they just have the turbojet (which is already tuned to mostly generate rotational energy to drive the fan turbine rather than produce thrust itself) and use that to spin a generator. Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated than that in reality, but there are quite a lot of old engines no longer certified for flight out of an abundance of caution but that still work fine, and a market for high-power generators that don’t need to be the pinnacle of efficiency (originally as backups just for occasional use, and now because of AI companies caring only about speed and not about cost).
so much waste. why bother flying in your personal jet to burn the world down when you can just leave it idling on the ground?
Idling? What makes you think that these things won’t be running at full blast 24/7?
This is fairly common I think. In Belgium it’s one of the back-up plans in case of power shortage. (article)
Not very common. Those engines are 50 years old and are only powered up a few times per year to stabilize the power grid as they can quickly scale up and down in contrast to nuclear, wind and solar.
Most countries do not use them as they are only about 30% efficient and loud. A modern gas power plant can reach double that efficiency.