Will supercapacitors come to AI's rescue?

In the U.K., electricity provider National Grid faces a problem every time there is a soccer match on (or any other widely viewed televised event for that matter): During half-time, or a commercial break, an inordinate number of viewers go to turn on their tea kettles. This highly British coordinated activity strains the energy grid, causing spikes in demand of sometimes thousands of megawatts. In AI training , a similar phenomenon can occur every second. Because training is orchestrated simultaneously among many thousands of GPUs in massive data centers, and with each new generation of GPU consuming an ever-increasing amount of power, each step of the computation corresponds to a massive energy spike. Now, at least three companies are coming out with a solution to smooth out the load seen by the grid—add banks of huge capacitors, known as supercapacitors , to those data centers. “When you have all of those GPU clusters, and they’re all linked together in the same workload, they’ll t ... Read full article.