Mh, in my recently slightly growing, but still tiny experience with HW&DC-Ops:
You have a lot more things in a DC than just GPUs consuming power and producing heat. GPUs are the big ones, sure, but after a while, switches, firewalls, storage units, other servers and so one all contribute to the power footprint significantly. A big small packet high throughput firewall packs a surprisingly high amount of compute capacity, eats a surprising amount of power and generates a lot of heat. Oh and it costs a couple of cars in total.
And that's the important abstraction / simplification you get when you start running hardware at scale. Your limitation is not necessarily TFlops, GHz or GB per cubic meter. It is easy to cram a crapton of those into a small place.
The main problem after a while is the ability to put enough power into the building and to move the heat out of it again. It sure would be easy to put a lot of resistors into a place to make a lot of power consumption. Hamburg Energy is currently building just that to bleed off excess solar power into the grid heating.
It's problematic to connect that to the 10kv power grid safely and to move the heat away from the system fast.
You have a lot more things in a DC than just GPUs consuming power and producing heat. GPUs are the big ones, sure, but after a while, switches, firewalls, storage units, other servers and so one all contribute to the power footprint significantly. A big small packet high throughput firewall packs a surprisingly high amount of compute capacity, eats a surprising amount of power and generates a lot of heat. Oh and it costs a couple of cars in total.
And that's the important abstraction / simplification you get when you start running hardware at scale. Your limitation is not necessarily TFlops, GHz or GB per cubic meter. It is easy to cram a crapton of those into a small place.
The main problem after a while is the ability to put enough power into the building and to move the heat out of it again. It sure would be easy to put a lot of resistors into a place to make a lot of power consumption. Hamburg Energy is currently building just that to bleed off excess solar power into the grid heating.
It's problematic to connect that to the 10kv power grid safely and to move the heat away from the system fast.