The Simulation Glitched

Turtles all the way down, at least until level 42.

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Where were you when our simulation glitched?

In my version, it happened a little before 10 a.m. on Labor Day, 2024. For the second time in just over a month, xAI, through its mouthpiece and CEO Elon Musk, announced a new supercomputer called Colossus had come online. Somehow, they’d strung together one hundred thousand H100 GPUs in only 122 days. Elon meant for us to be awestruck by the Remarkable Feat of building the world’s largest supercomputing cluster in an unreasonably short time.

I scratched my head. xAI announced Colossus in July. Did this mean xAI just brought another massive cluster online in Memphis, Tennessee??

I had that weird sensation of flashing lights at the edge of my vision, the sound of static, and the shakiness you feel during an electrolyte deficit.

I queried my faithful AI assistant, Perplexity, and it found me plentiful links to articles reporting on the contents of this single tweet. (Apparently, reading tweets qualifies as reporting these days.) Surprisingly, none of the articles mentioned this July 22nd announcement or attempted to clarify what was different now from what happened before.

I’m not on social media, but it looks like A LOT of people saw this post.

Going purely on September 2nd’s reporting, It was almost as if the event on July 22nd hadn’t happened.?

Or had it? I had a moment of doubt.

I had so many questions. What is the difference between bringing a massive training cluster online and starting training with that cluster? Wouldn’t bringing it online precede starting the training? July 22 comes before September 2 on the Gregorian calendar. Did the timeline somehow flip??

It took a few days (proper reporting usually does) before NPR produced this article , recounting surprise announcements at last-minute press conferences, xAI forcing local utility officials to sign NDAs, and the local city council left entirely in the dark about the presence of a giant new data center in their backyard. Had no one in Memphis been among the almost twenty million Twitter users who’d viewed the July 22 post? That seemed implausible.

The article focuses on the data center's environmental impacts–bravo, reporters!–while completely ignoring the distinctly glitch-like inconsistencies in the storyline–boo!

Local councilwoman Yolanda Cooper-Sutton suspects something is up.

“I have an old saying from my grandparents: What it won't get in the wash, it’ll take care of in the rinse,” she says. “So, if there's any secrets and if there's a dead cat on the line — it’ll soon show up.”

That is a very esoteric way of saying something doesn’t seem right, and she planned to get to the bottom of it. Had she noticed the glitch? Maybe she heard the same buzzy static, weirdly flashing lights, and unnerving shakiness that I had.

I believe there’s a strong probability that our race to superintelligence will finally hurl humanity off the cliff of climate change. Understandably, the July announcement caught my eye. I posted about it, referencing an article I wrote in 2023, in which I speculated that the AI industry would collide head-on with climate change to devastating effect.

Running a 100,000 GPU cluster requires about 150GW of electricity–enough to power 100,000 homes annually–and consumes about 1.3 million gallons of water daily. The local power authority claims the giant data center’s water and power requirements will not impact the local community. That seems unlikely, given it clearly can’t service a 150GW data center.?

We know this because xAI allegedly fired up at least 18 methane gas generators to close the power gap without proper permits. Since methane is colorless and odorless, natural gas producers tend to add a chemical that smells like rotten eggs so you can detect leaks. These generators can emit roughly 130 tons of nitrogen oxides into the air each year.?

That sounds super fun for the surrounding Boxtown community. I bet the residents look forward to Elon realizing part two of his boast: “Moreover, it will double in size…in a few months.”

1.3 million gallons of water is 3% of the total capacity of the local water supply. In the short term, that doesn’t sound like a huge number. But, the larger these data centers and clusters get, the more resource-intensive they become. Suppose those additional fifty H200s more than double the water consumption. And then Google, Meta, Microsoft, and a host of other AI players decide Memphis is a good home for their massive data centers. And then the data centers after that have a million GPU clusters, the ones after that have ten million, and the ones after that have one hundred million. By the end of the decade, three orders of magnitude seem inevitable if companies can start popping out 100K clusters in three months.

Take that, Memphis water supply.

I predict that ten years from now, Memphis will be forced to negotiate with emergent national superpower Cairo, IL, a formerly sleepy burgh nestled in the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, to open their newly constructed damns and resupply its dwindling groundwater.?

My head is itching. Is your head itching?...

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