As the United States’ pinnacle of extravaganza, the Las Vegas Strip and the rest of the town of Paradise are on a seemingly never-ending quest to become brighter, glossier and more over the top as one venue tries to overshadow the competition. A good example of this is the ironically very uninspiredly named Sphere, which has both an incredibly dull name and yet forms a completely outrageous entertainment venue with a 54,000 m2 (~3.67 acre) wrap-around interior LED display (16 x 16K displays) and an exterior LED display (‘Exosphere’) consisting out of 1.23 million LED ‘pucks’. Although opened in September of 2023, details about the hardware that drives those displays have now been published by NVidia in a recent blog post.
Driving all these pixels are around 150 NVidia RTX A6000 GPUs, installed in computer systems which are networked using NVidia BlueField data processing units (DPUs) and NVidia ConnectX-6 NICs (up to 400 Gb/s), with visual content transferred from Sphere Studios in California to the Sphere. All this hardware uses about 45 kW of power when running at full blast, before adding the LED displays and related hardware to the total count, which is estimated to be up to 28 MW of power and causing local environmentalists grief despite claims by the owner that it’ll use solar power for 70% of the power needs, despite many night-time events. Another item that locals take issue with is the amount of light pollution that the exterior display adds.
Although it’s popular to either attack or defend luxurious excesses like the Sphere, it’s interesting to note that the state of Nevada mostly gets its electricity from natural gas. Meanwhile the 2.3 billion USD price tag for the Sphere would have gotten Nevada 16.5% of a nuclear power station like Arizona’s Palo Verde (before the recurring power bill), but Palo Verde’s reactor spheres are admittedly less suitable for rock concerts.
>Meanwhile the 2.3 billion USD price tag for the Sphere would have gotten Nevada 16.5% of a nuclear power station like Arizona’s Palo Verde
Did I miss something somewhere?
the Sphere was the brain child of, and largely paid for by, billionaire James Dolan, the CEO of the Madison Square Garden Company.
Who cares how much of a nuclear powerplant Nevada could have gotten. They didnt have nor spend the money for the construction of the sphere.
They also wont be paying the power bill.
They will however be collecting a tidy sum from the 9% tax on the venues ticket sales.
You want to cry about wasteful power consumption? Come back to The Sphere when youve gotten Crypto Currency sorted out. SRSLY!
As much I do not like this kind of ostentatious way to show the contempt for the global ecological disaster(s) in progress, I totally get your point !
I’d be very interested to read a good sum-up of the impact vs returns of cryptos.
There are no global ecological disasters in progress.
Is consuming power for cryptocurrency wasteful? Yes!
Is consuming power for “The Sphere” wasteful? Yes!
We can disapprove both at the same time.
(Although personally I can’t do anything about either of these – aside from never visiting Vegas and never using cryptoshit)
Being green by reducing consumption is being pessimistic.
Instead we should aim to become an even more wasteful multi-planet (even multi-galaxy) species so that our wastefulness is only overshadowed by the abundance of resources we have at hand from conquering so many planets.
Solar panels are very cool though, I like them.
Some would say that allowing all those stars to spew their energy out into space, unused and unutilized, is the biggest form of waste known to man.
Even solar panels as they are currently used can only access a fraction of a percent of the suns output, that which is directed towards earth.
Conquering space to harness that and prevent the waste of so much energy is imperative!
Amen, having the resources to address a planetary issue should include a plan to acquire those resources. Saying no to every new idea isn’t very progressive.
Casinos consume one-fifth of all electricity in the city..MGM Grand reportedly uses at least 400 million megawatts of electricity each year. Running 24/7 at the level stated here would set the spheres lighting at 244608 MW or roughly 1/1600th the total of the MGM grand property.
Vegas isnt designed to be ecofriendly. Its a resort town in the middle of the desert. Yet, The Bellagio pumps in 12 million gallons of water a year, ~33,000 gallons a day, just to keep up its fountain show from drying up. Lets not even get into the power required to keep the millions of square feet of casinos and hotel rooms chilly.
The state of Nevada doeant have much else generating capital. The majority of the states income comes from Sales Tax, Entertainment taxes, and Gambling taxes. The Sphere is just the latest bit of gaudy glitz built to convince people that Nevada’s worth visiting or existing.
Surely 400,000,000 MW hours per year is a typo (or is it MW seconds to make the number look more terrifying). That means they’d be consuming 50GW constantly which is an insane amount.
I found an article about the MGM adding 100MW of solar that’s supposed to be 90% of their daytime usage at peak production, so, their usage is probably around 200MW hours (give or take 100MW), which falls far short of the 50,000MW your number suggests.
If we assume 250MW (probably an overestimate) then the sphere is about 10% which isn’t insignificant.
Maybe if they get public flak for it they will also spend a billion dollars on solar and batteries for the PR. (Personally I doubt it)
Sorry for replying twice, but the 400,000,000 MW number is just wrong, because that’s almost 10x the maximum output of all of Nevada’s powerplants.
“In 2022, Nevada had a total summer capacity of 13,541 MW through all of its power plants, and a net generation of 42,591 GWh.”
400,000GWh vs 42,591 GWh
I saw the in-house movie there. Postcards from Earth. Just awful. The most ham-fisted ecological message you could possibly imagine, somehow delivered artlessly despite the impressive visuals, just a hugely expensive waste of time wherein some billionaires waggle their fingers at you for daring to live and breathe. The entire time all you can think about is how many gigawatts are being wasted relaying this message in the most ostentatious manner possible. The sphere is really bad, that place just sucks on an aesthetic level. All over the inside you have random mathematical formulae etched onto everything like “ooooh we’re so cerebral!”
Just a big wank. Las Vegas attractions were always huge and ostentatious, but at least they were fun. Big replicas of pyramids or temples or pirate ships, et cetera. This is just a giant temple to being conspicuously “ethical” (but not really) and full of yourself. There’s not even any gambling!
Isn’t the entirety of Vegas a big artless wank though? Isn’t that kind of the point of the place?
I’m sort of torn with the sphere – yes it’s wasteful but at least it’s an original and impressive construction/concept that is genuinely an interesting thing, dare I say it’s almost an art installation?
Compared to a whole heap of other things humanity wastes energy & resources on it is at least an interesting one – and I would hope that a city in the desert might find some way of renewably powering itself sooner or later, I hear some folks have been working on these panel thingies that make energy from sunlight but I can’t see it catching on…
I don’t think the Egyptian revival was artless at all, quite the opposite. Whatever this is (Reddit scientism? Scold-core?) is definitely far uglier and more annoying.
54,000 square meters = 5.4 hectares is more like 13.3 acres, not 3.67 acres.
ConnectX-6s only go to 200Gb/s. The 7 model introduced 400Gb/s
The Sphere is an absolutely amazing venue. I saw Dead & Co. there recently, and the audio quality was superb, as well as the haptic seats during the drum solo – the entire place shook. The visuals were the best ever ever ever ever, there’s simply nothing in my 40 year concert-going history that even comes close to the experience. Dead & Company were also top-notch, and I wasn’t really a fan before.
I am missing something here. Why 150 GPUs unless you are showing off numbers? 1.25 mil pixels is impressive, but nothing a single GPU cannot handle…
It’s just a bunch of blinking LED’s, couldn’t they just have used a big box of 555’s?
I’m pretty sure things could have been made less complex, but I’m also pretty sure that most of the redundancy in the system is a result of making it easier to develop/install/upgrade/maintain.
1.23 million LED ‘pucks’ sounds like a lot and I’m pretty sure it is a lot too. But a modern 4K TV has 3,840 horizontal pixels and 2,160 vertical pixels, for a total of about 8.3 million pixels. It’s a bit smaller and less bright though.
The linked NVidia blog article mentions that the GPUs are used for both the indoor and outdoor displays. The indoor display is 16,000×16,000 pixels for a total of 256 million pixels, plus the 1.25 mil outside.
“Behind the screens, around 150 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs help power stunning visuals on floor-to-ceiling, 16x16K displays across the Sphere’s interior, as well as 1.2 million programmable LED pucks on the venue’s exterior — the Exosphere, which is the world’s largest LED screen.”
There are 1.23 millions pucks, and each puck seems to have 48 LEDs, so my understanding is that it is really 59.04 millions LEDs. And depending on how the pucks are designed, if each LED is not an adressable one, but instead independant RGB and maybe W channels, you may be have to multiple that number by 3 or 4.
And also: you not only need to drive these LEDs, you also need to have a video source for them. That probably means to have:
– some kind of video files: maybe one file but with an insane resolution, or several synchronized ones, but in all case that’s a huge amount of pixels per frame, and so a huge amount of memory
– probably compressed: so huge amount of GPU power to decompress
– probably progressive, so relatively high frame rate to ensure smooth movements (at least 60p).
So yes, all that defenitely require an mind blowing amount of CPU, GPU, RAM, network bandwidth…
At this scale, each puck is a pixel – the individual elements would just be to increase overall brightness/bigger point of light
The exterior is roughly SXGA which is nothing to a GPU from the last 20 years to handle, those stats must be about the interior only
Did they say the GPUs were only for the exterior?
I assume the huge number of GPUs was for the much higher resolution inside screens they mentioned.
“Meanwhile the 2.3 billion USD price tag for the Sphere would have gotten Nevada 16.5% of a nuclear power station like Arizona’s Palo Verde (before the recurring power bill),”
Last I checked, it wasn’t the state that build the sphere, but a private company, with their own money. The sphere is a company, trying to make their investment back and make money. This line makes zero sense.
Maybe the implication is that state should have seized the money and then still only have less than 1/5th of what they needed….
Indeed. It’s as if they believe privately-held assets somehow belong to everybody…..
It might also have meant that the private company could have used the funds to build a nuclear power plant instead of the sphere, which would also have been an investment to try and earn back the money plus more. Admittedly, not as ostentatious, and I don’t know if private companies can even build a nuclear power plant in the US anymore or if it has to be a governmental entity.
It would be interesting to see which structure would have generated more negative outcry. (People who think it’s wasteful/eyesore vs. NIMBY-ists.)
Most American nuclear plants are privately owned. The US is generally allergic to government-provided electricity.
Most nuclear power plants in the US are also privately companies, trying to make a profit. I see no problem in pointing to two different commercial projects and suggesting that we, as consumers and voters, supported one more than the other.
Well, if the nuclear imdustry was run by market forces that might be true but since the same environmental alarmists are also against new modern nuclear plants, the industry has no chance of getting a project off the drawing board. As a voter and tax payer you have a say so in this but you would be up against a bunch of other voters and tax payers that do not understand base power production, enhanced safety of modern nuclear plants and the energy storage limitations of wind and solar power. Our politicians treat nuclear plants like an untouchable third rail because if you can’t defend it in a 30 second sound bite, you will lose votes. The dumbing down of energy policy ensures we will keep pushing all electric consumer products without a comprehensive gird and production plan. Hence your “green” vehicle and appliances are powered by coal and petroleum.
Nevada power company is free to build a nuclear power plant if they want and can get it past the huge regulatory hurdles and can find the water source to cool it which will cause even more environmental complaints. BTW the 45 KW for the video computers is nothing. I have single data center racks that use more than that. This may be a more visual consumer of power but the datacenters in cities across the country are consuming far more power just collecting your shopping preferences and feeding you cute cat videos.
If only a city in the middle of an incredibly sunny desert could find some way of renewably generating power…
It’s not sunny at night, which is when this city comes to live and what is depicted in the photo of the article. So solar energy is not an option if that’s what you were implying.
Nuclear energy is the best renewable form of energy (it’s renewable since we will never run out).
If only we had some sort of way to store energy that could be used whenever, alas I am condemned to keeping my cellphone plugged it at all times…
Feel free to build a solar farm with sufficient storage to supply Vegas at night. You should make a fortune doing that. Oh BTW, the taxpayer is not going to subsidize you since it is such a no brainer financial windfall.
There is no economically feasible battery technology to store enough energy to charge during the day using the weather and power an entire city at night. In simpler words: grid batteries don’t exist. This is why power plants adjust their output and industrial users adjust their load based on variable pricing. Pumped hydro storage is another technology, but that has geological requirements.
Your phone can be charged a few hundred times and then the battery is worn out, but due to advanced battery saving features of the modem and of the OS it conserves energy when not in use so that’s why a new phone doesn’t need to be charged daily. If you used the same technology for grid level storage it would not only cost billions of dollars it will be charged and discharged every single day so it will have to be replaced after a year.
There is at least hundreds of millions of years of nuclear fuel with today’s technology. So we will have hundreds of millions of years to improve it or find an alternative.
(Aside from electricity, useful isotopes and helium) Nuclear power could in theory be used to produce e-fuels, desalinate water, produce fertilizer, heat homes, etc. We can become a nuclear civilization and only use gas or solar for remote or portable uses.
There are many snags and hangups that make it very difficult to do that with current technology, which is why nobody on earth does it at that scale
Thanks for melting the icecaps and causing hurricanes.
hurricanes have always existed and there is no increase in their frequency
tell that to insurance companies along the Atlantic coast. 9/10 of the costliest storms have been in the last 20 years and, where I live, insurance rates went up 2x over the last couple of years and it is difficult to get homeowner insurance at all. not to mention flood insurance…
Light pollution in Las Vegas? You gotta be kidding, right?
Well there’s nice light shows and then there’s totally fugly light shows
There must be something wrong with this world if there are people who have so much money they can’t think of anything better to do with it then spend it on fads like this. Even paying taxes so some hard needed maintenance on for example infrastructure can be done is more useful, though lash flashy.
As with anything, it is how you look at it. First there only a ‘few’ people that have that much money. Second, that money that is being spent is putting people to work. Those LED modules were not created in a vacuum or cost free. Someone has to maintain it, putting more people to work. Designing the displays, etc. Paying the utility bill. Now, if the people were ‘hoarding’ their wealth then we have a problem :) . I consider gambling/lottery a waste of money — my perspective…
That said, bit coin mining is a true waste of ‘energy’. That I agree with.
How much power is used hosting websites like this and the computers used to post about how others are using power irresponsibly? This venue is entertaining thousands of people simultaneously, your PC and its millions of pixels are entertaining probably one person. Which is more efficient?
Thankfully it is well documented that all tax revenue is used efficiently in the maintenance and production of infrastructure and never has any amount of it ever been wasted.
If Nevada wanted a nuclear power plant let them build one. Hell if the government actually said here’s all the paperwork signed we authorize construction I bet they would get private companies willing to do it. But tack on the 1 billion in government red tape and suddenly people don’t to throw money down the drain. God how selfish of them.
This guy thinks his taxes are used to maintain infrastructure! LOL!
taxes are used on infrastructure, HEAVILY…..just mostly in other countries we routinely bomb, or send bombs too.
“There must be something wrong with this world if there are people who have so much money[…]”
There must be something wrong with this world if there are people like you who make a problem out of everything rich people do or don’t do. How rich people spend their money on high tech toys does not negatively impact anyone. It does create jobs and drives technology further so it benefits society as a whole. Could there be better investments? Probably. But that doesn’t make it a bad investment.
“Even paying taxes so some hard needed maintenance on for example infrastructure can be done is more useful”
Paying taxes is the worst investment you can make. Also there is enough revenue to maintain infrastructure. Only 1% of US tax revenue goes to infrastructure, while a quarter goes to the military (much of which is used on useless wars). More than twice the money spend on infrastructure in 2023 went to Ukraine. In other words “muh roads” is not a good argument.
Cool, but can it play Doom?