this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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Uh solar panels cost a bunch of money to make and they take a ton of space, which means buying extra land
Solar panels are cheap these days and end up paying for themselves in cost savings. Especially when you own the factory that makes them.
It's also good advertising. "We've powered this data centre with our solar panels, think of what it could power for you".
Like all that useless roof space?
I don't think you have any idea how much the power consumption is unfortunately. The roof would cover maybe 1-10% of the power consumption of a modern data center. A single rack's power consumption is basically the same as a neighborhood. An entire data center is more like a small country.
To be clear I'm not trying to say it's OK they're using gas plants, I'm just saying why the solar power Musk promised was never going to be feasible.
Edit: My bad, this is a fab, I thought it was yet another XAI datacenter. Might be more feasible, but still - for energy intensive purposes, which this is likely to be, on-site solar can offset part of the energy requirement, but generally not all of it.
The FAB is going to need 10GW of power when done.
The US biggest solar array is 900MW and uses between 4600 and 5000 acres.
To do that with solar, you'd need to over provision by 3-4x plus batteries to run for bad weather for days. The scale of this is bonkers.
This is what nuclear is good for.
Just stack several layers of solar panels, easy.
Weird shit happens when you do that… you put a new one up, suddenly the last one stops getting power. Take it back down, the problem is solved. Weird shit.
That's easily solved by turning the panels upside down!
They make them? They would likely have the lowest price per kwh achieveable in history given their size and current costs.
The absolute size of their premises is also ridiculous.
There is no way this is not a bad decision or else there is a political apect.
The Republican party is a religion with two and only two commandments: Racism and fossil fuels.
They literally own a company that makes them, can't get cheaper than that.
They're doing this as a stunt for some stupid reason.