Your Next Datacenter Could Be In The Middle Of Nowhere
The Register, Monday, July 15th, 2024
Training AI models doesn't need low latency. It needs cheap energy - wherever it can be found
Port Hedland is a town of just 16,000 people in a hot and dusty corner of northwestern Australia, 1,600 kilometers by road from the nearest substantial city. As such, it's seemingly an odd place for a datacenter run by Australian operator NEXTDC. Yet such locations are increasingly in demand, thanks to their proximity to energy sources - given the voracious appetite for compute capacity to train artificial intelligence models.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has advanced the idea of remote datacenters, because he thinks they're where the heavy lifting for AI can be done with low energy costs and environmental impact.