The current uprise of Large Language Models (LLMs) is no news. Since the beginning of 2023, LLMs have been the biggest topic of discussion in technological advancements. People are thinking of LLMs as what fire was to mankind.
These LLMs are now being vended to millions of users, who ask questions ranging from - "what is the weather today?" to "Explain this math homework". I even created the following image with a local LLM. Crazy!
Whether LLMs will solve all mankind's current problems of Climate Change, Economic equality and more, is not clear. However, what we can tell is their huge requirements for power and how it is currently shaping the industry.
If I were to simplify a lot - LLMs, today, require GPUs to run the computation of predicting the next word. For instance, a normal personal desktop that one has at home, could technically run a LLM, albeit, at a very slow pace which would drive you crazy. Hence, currently, all the big corporations are in a race to modify their own datacenters, to consist of thousands of commercial GPUs, which will then be used to serve the millions of users we talked about. However, this is where the problem arises. Previously the energy requirements for a datacenter was simple and they could rely on normal commercial agreements for their needs. This simply doesn't work anymore. These huge numbers of power guzzling GPUs require way more energy and hence, now the data centers are shifting to on-site generation.
Given that the energy requirements for these datacenters, because of their new GPU compute, is high, renewable sources are struggling to come into the picture. Hence, because of all these changes in trends, the only feasible solution to match the energy requirements for these data centers are on-site Gas turbines.
This has obviously raised the prices of the once ordinary gas turbines - such as General Electric (GE) LM2500, General Electric (GE) LM6000 machines, to extraordinary prices. For instance, before this boom of datacenters, we dealt with LM2500 machines at roughly $1.5-2.5 million dollars. Now the same machines are demanding prices north of $15 million dollars. A similar situation for the LM6000.
The reliability of these machines is not up for question. These were machines which were introduced in 1960s for the US Navy. These machines were built for military requirements. However, there is one point of concern for these turbines - their emissions !