In this case the output wasn’t actually used for financial modeling. If it had been, it would have been caught immediately when someone put it into a table where they calculated the price or the supply constraints or anything else.
If news agencies needed to pay out fines for false info, you better believe they’d be checking more.
Do not install aluminum wire if you are a homeowner unless you already know enough to use antioxidant paste and also to use a torque screwdriver or torque wrench for terminations and know where to find the torque values for the wiring devices you are using. If you don’t apply the paste, the surface of the aluminum will oxidize and could catch fire due to increased resistance.
I suggest not even touching copper as a homeowner, but it’s your choice and your house.
The math they do with their assumptions is usually pretty good, and you can tell when they put in the effort, but wow, the models and assumptions are all over the place.
In reality copper is just convenient. We use it because it's easy to work with, a great conductor, and (until recently) quite affordable. But for most applications there's no reason we couldn't use something else!
For example, a 1.5mm2 copper conductor is 0.0134kg/m, which at current prices is $0.17 / meter. A 2.4mm2 aluminum conductor has the same resistance, weighs 0.0065kg/m, which at current prices is $0.0195 / meter!
Sure, aluminum is a pain to work with, but with a price premium like that there's a massive incentive to find a way to make it work.
Copper can't get too expensive simply due to power demands because people will just switch to aluminum. The power grid itself had been using it for decades, after all - some internal datacenter busbars should be doable as well.
Check it out:
https://lugsdirect.com/WhyAluminumOverCopperFAQ.htm
And you can browse that site for lugs, and they’re mostly rated for aluminum and copper. Copper-only lugs are actually rather unusual.
Sure, you can’t stick copper and aluminum wires into a wire nut, and finding terminations for smaller-gauge aluminum wire can be hard. But for larger wire, it’s really no problem.
Residential aluminum is a Really Bad Idea because DIY Dave will inevitably do something wrong - which then leads to a fire hazard. Copper is a lot more forgiving.
But a large scale datacenter, solar farm, or battery storage installation? Those will be installed and maintained by trained electricians, which means they actually know what a "torque wrench" is, and how to deal with scary words like "corrosion" and "oxidation".
Like I said: it's what's used for most of the power grid. With the right training it really isn't a big deal.
For commercial installs, it shouldn't be a problem as long as it's planned for.
That said, there is no reason we can't design better connectors that can withstand the expansion and shrinkage cycles, like spring loaded or spring cage connectors.
Most homeowners know none of the requirements of aluminum wire installation so I don’t recommend using it, oxidation is bad and can cause fires. Just pay for copper NM cable, it’s dirt cheap anyways.
FWIW I sell and run electrical work for a living. I assume crote and amluto work in the electrical industry, since they’re the only other posters in this discussion who know what they’re talking about.
The biggest reason is that aluminum oxidizes, and unlike copper, the oxide layer has high resistivity. In theory that shouldn’t be an issue in datacenters hiring expert technicians.
Aluminum bus bars(solid, often exposed) would be designed for the required power levels and installation criteria.
TIL. I thought it would be relatively expensive due to the difficulty of extracting it.
(Iron is much cheaper than I thought, too.)
The Washington Monument has an aluminum cap, which at the time was as expensive as silver. Two years later the Hall-Héroult process was invented, and as a result the price plummeted.
Aluminum has a higher resistance, which means the same diameter will get hotter than copper. Make the cable thicker and its resistance drops, which means it gets less hot.
Want more amps at the same temperature? Ohm's law still applies: just use a thicker cable.
Wire can be used for up to whatever ampacity is listed for that size wire and temperature rating in Table 310.16 (Conductor Ampacity) Copper and aluminum have separate ampacity tables because you need to use larger aluminum conductors.
Example:
#250MCM THHN copper can handle 255A in a commercial setting (75C column)
#250MCM THHN aluminum can handle 205A in a commercial setting (75C column).
NEC ampacity table: https://media.distributordatasolutions.com/ThomasAndBetts/v2...
Look at the electrical fires of the 1950’s and 1960’s as an example, and that was at household levels of current.
Aluminum is used, but everything accounts for the insane coefficient of linear expansion and other annoying properties.
Each feeder can be aluminum if you put special goop on any copper connections. Breakers accept it just fine, etc.
You should avoid it for smaller wiring, though. There's special 8000 series aluminum if you're trying to be serious with Al feeders
It's convenient, it's easy to work with, great conductivity, and cheap enough all at the sametime... Dude, I think you just explained why cropper is used instead of anything else.
Really? In larger sizes, an equivalent ampacity aluminum cable is generally lighter and more flexible than copper. The main downside is that it’s thicker.
(Common terminations for larger wire sizes are often dual-rated for aluminum and copper. The engineering details for how to design lugs that work well for aluminum and copper were worked out long ago.)
> "Tat sounds like the ultimate catalyst for the commodities market and copper has been hitting records."
"Tat" should be "That", imo.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-800-v-hvdc-architec...
Quickly doing such "back of an envelope" calculations, and calling out things that seem outlandish, could be a useful function of an AI assistant.
Sure, using or not using your brain is a negligible energy difference, so if you aren't using it you really should, for energy efficiency's sake. But I don't think the claim that our brains are more energy efficient is obviously true on its own. The issue is more about induced demand from having all this external "thinking" capacity on your fingertips
It's not hard to imagine why, as the embedding vectors for terms like pounds/kilograms and feet/yards/meters are not going to be far from each other. Extreme caution is called for.
Whether talking weight or bulk a decimal place is approximately the difference between needing a wheelbarrow, a truck, a semi truck, a freight train and a ship.
Even among engineering fields routine handling of diverse and messy unit systems (e.g. chemical engineering) are relatively uncommon. If you work in one of these domains, there is a practiced discipline to detect unit conversion mistakes. You can do it in your head well enough to notice when something seems off but it requires encyclopedic knowledge that the average person is unlikely to have.
A common form of this is a press release that suggests a prototype process can scale up to solve some planetary problem. In many cases you can quickly estimate that planetary scale would require some part of the upstream inputs to be orders of magnitude larger than exists or is feasible. The media doesn't notice this part and runs with the "save the planet" story.
This is the industrial chemistry version of the "in mice" press releases in medicine. It is an analogue to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
But bus bars generally should be protected regardless of voltage as they carry currents from high current capacity sources so even a lower voltage can be a safety concern.
Many server power supplies can take AC or DC input, with the DC input in the 300-500V range as this is comparable to the boost voltage for the AC power factor correction circuit. I just assumed most data centers using DC would be distributing around 400V within each rack.
Source: we benchmark this sort of stuff at my company and for the past year or so frontier models with a modest reasoning budget typically succeed at arithmetic problems (except for multiplication/division problems with many decimal places, which this isn't).
ChatGPT 5.2 has recently been churning through unsolved Erdös problems.
I think right now one is partially validated by a pro and the other one I know of is "ai-solved" but not verified. As in: we're the ones who can't quite keep up.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07421
And the only reason they can't count Rs is that we don't show them Rs due to a performance optimization.
Those of us who don’t base our technical understandings on memes are well aware of the tooling at the disposal of all modern reasoning models gives them the capability to do such things.
Please don’t bring the culture war here.
