Jarrod Kahn
339 posts
@kahnvex
Research @GoogleDeepMind, x-@AIatMeta, x-@YouTube ➜ /home/kahnvex/logs cat *
I can't comment on these numbers, but calculations like this show that for AI model companies, compute is basically all opex, not capex. Even model training costs aren't a one-and-done thing; you always have to keep training the next model. The compute cost never goes away.
Gebru accused me of "gaslighting" residents of Memphis because another commenter had said their total utility bills (electric + water + solid waste) had gone up, and I denied this was due to the data center. I was immediately blocked after so I couldn't reply. Do want to just clear my name and then be done. The reason I denied this was that the commenter themselves said that they didn't know the split between their electricity and water bill and how much each increased. But we can be pretty sure their water bills haven't risen from the data center for a simple reason: there's no documentation of them rising at all since 2022. First, electricity rates have gone up significantly in Memphis (like everywhere else in the country) (localmemphis.com/article/news/l…) so this likely makes up a big portion of the increase. Water rates have stayed flat since ~2022, way before the data center started operating. (mlgw.com/residential/re…) In fact, as an aside, Memphis has one of the very cheapest water rates in the country as of 2025 (page 2 here: mlgw.com/images/content…). Gebru highlighted a Reddit comment with someone in Memphis complaining that their "Water and fees" section of the bill went up by $20-30 reddit.com/r/memphis/comm… But the "and fees" is doing a lot of work here. $12 of that is a new solid waste fee increase mlgw.com/images/content… I can only find city documents and reporting saying that water rates and costs stayed flat, though I'd be open to correction on this. But it seems like water costs haven't actually increased in Memphis at all in the time Colossus has been running, and are still some of the very cheapest in the country. The city's also making XAI pay for a massive new water treatment facility itself, so infrastructure costs aren't passed on. fox13memphis.com/news/xai-break… So to be clear I never denied that Memphis total utility bills went up. I'm not denying anyone on the ground's experience. What I am denying is that this shows the data center caused the water cost increase. It doesn't seem like it did, because there is none. So to put it mildly I'd disagree that this is gaslighting. AI water stuff makes a lot of people say really ridiculous stuff, and Gebru doesn't care about what's true here and is pretty quick to move to wild accusations about how I hate poor people.
@OriolVinyalsML spilled our super-secret recipe for making Gemini 3 better than Gemini 2.5: improve pre-training and improve post-training! 😅
