The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption.
Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.
Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.
shocking how quickly we went from "how can we contain global warming to 1.5C increase?" to "we've (hopefully) unlocked a massive new corporate revenue source, screw everything else"
The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better.
I doubt this. It's probably quite high but there is a limit to how much compute you can genuinely use. Just like there's only so much water you're gonna use even if you greatly enjoy Californian almonds.
However, there's probably no limit to energy/electricity we can usefully allocate. And therefore yes, we should in fact provide as much as possible, Dyson spheres and all.
Isn’t this exactly the type of thing that a market is designed to discover, which we’re seeing unfold right now?
Yes, maybe they’re building too many right now, who knows. It’s very likely that demand for computation will go up in the future, and EVs are also going to be consuming much more electricity, so all governments better start preparing for more (clean) electrical supply.
I'd be more OK with it if prices weren't subsidized so much and people actually had to pay to ask opus how to pee, then maybe we would realize we don't need beefier models for everything
There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
Training is quite expensive and it does look likely that the American providers have been doing that at a loss.
In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in, and 140W is not exactly a huge amount of power (roughly 50¢ per day if you run it 24/7 at 100% load, which it is very unlikely you will).
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
None of the big providers are profitable. It’s subsidised by overly enthusiastic VCs.
> In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in
Right, people could. But they won’t, because that’s a bloody expensive computer and they don’t need that to ask ChatGPT. That war is lost already.
Subscription to the big players’ services would need to increase massively for that to happen. And the computational cost is only part of the problem; these models also eat a lot of storage and RAM, which is not exactly getting cheaper.
The typical "free" AI or cheap tiers are equivalent in power to a Qwen 3.6 model (which is also much cheaper to run in a hyperscaled situation than on my laptop or PC; a single H200 can host thousands of sessions of a typical chatbot user). There is no evidence the Chinese AI providers are being subsidised either.
You can look at API pricing on a service like OpenRouter (which isn't subsidised) and see pretty readily that it's not expensive to provide lower-tier inference. Higher-tier inference like GPT-5.6-Sol or Opus is expensive - $100 a month plan for realistic usage, and only up from there.
I agree with using smaller models, it's just that the majority of people I know feel like they need the biggest, beefier, behemoth model possible (with the longest thought setting) and consume much more than necessary when a flash or smaller model would be OK. I would also like to be able to use a smaller model, but given ram prices I would have to sell a kidney to buy ram now
Most people who use a free or $20 a month plan are already using smaller models, and the mainstream chatbot services will route requests to a smaller model often without really telling the end user.
You can run Qwen-3.6 on a 32GB card which will set you back about $1400, or $400 of just RAM if you want to run it on a CPU.
There is no evidence Chinese providers are getting such subsidised, and in fact apparently Jinping (who presumably knows what the CPP is doing) was surprised when DeepSeek and Qwen generated so much buzz. In China, AI inference is just viewed as another basic utility, much like an e-mail provider or a mobile phone network.
I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?
> I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?
NASDAQ bent their rules to allow SpaceX a (way too early) inclusion into the index and so did MSCI [2] and Russell [3].
Normally, a newly IPO'd stock would have required up to a year of "cooldown" (like the S&P 500 requires) so that stock prices can stabilize. Now though? Billions of dollars in funds are automatically flowing in from retirement accounts into SpaceX and artificially prop up the valuation of this grossly overvalued company. And OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to IPO as soon as possible as well to benefit from the same rules while the markets are still red-hot bullish for anything that can be labeled even remotely related to AI.
Assuming that there will be a catastrophic collapse event in the AI bubble - the triggers can be anything from regulatory issues (no matter if in the US, EU or China), new free models from China cutting off the moat of the Big Three, venture capital running out and forcing realistic pricing or a natural disaster/war wiping out TSMC or RAM factories, interrupting supply for the continued outbuild -, this will directly (and massively) impact retirement accounts.
In addition, even the sell-offs required in ETF rebalancing can have serious economic consequences. Something has to give when SpaceX, OAI and Anthropic all enter.
I get what you're saying, but I'm guessing that people asking how to pee is a drop in the bucket compared to the agentic loops being called to rename some variables across a project.
I don’t use AI so this comes across to me as a bit of a culture shock, but is asking AI to rename a variable across project really something AI users are wasting their tokens on? In emacs I can do that with `S-l r r` or `M-x lsp-rename`.
Using AI to do this seems extremely inefficient and wasteful, not to mention improper and unprofessional, and that is looking past the moral implication of training on stolen code and polluting our climate.
GLM 5.2 isn't quite modern Opus tier, as seen in this comparison where Opus 4.5 scores 4/5 on some coding tasks where GLM 5.2 scores 0/5: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models But yes, GLM 5.2 is cheap.
But the real standout on price is DeepSeek V4 Flash, which competes, more or less, with models in between Sonnet and Haiku. From third-party providers, it costs around $0.09/M, $0.18/M out, compared to $3M/in, $15M/out for Sonnet and $1M/in, $5M/out for Haiku. To get the price of DSv4 (Flash and Pro) so low, DeepSeek did a lot of innovative optimization work that will likely show up in other open weight models in the future.
For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.
However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.
But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.
So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.
If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).
Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.
Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.
The need for memes knows no bounds. In short order the majority of power usage worldwide will be for compute and newer generations will wonder how it took so long.
Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.
I don't understand why permits are given for new generation that is CO2 positive outside of exceptional cases or when it replaces even worse kind. It's insanity.
> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.
BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
We've been paying hefty excise taxes on gasoline in Europe for decades. Yet nothing has changed. Environmentalists still have the exact same demands and supposedly nothing positive has come from this. It has just made everything more expensive. So what's the point?
If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.
"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding?
I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?
I think I'm much more compatible with my colleagues from the said countries, who are actually nice people, than I am with the rabid fascists having this kind of a take.
It’s anxiety about tipping points more than conspiracy theories. If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity. You may be insulated enough from the direct effects but what about what they trigger? Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices, extreme weather, and dysfunctional migration.
We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Most conspiracy theories think food grows in supermarkets and because they have a job which pays them a good global income they can just pay a bit more.
> If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity
Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.
Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.
They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.
> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices
False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".
Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.
> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.
> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is
We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.
> Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.
This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.
> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.
That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.
You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.
> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.
Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.
The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%.
> The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.
That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".
> They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
There are laws in the EU that will save the planet, like drinking from soggy paper straws instead of normal ones and requiring caps stay attached in plastic bottles.
And just to make sure, at least in Poland they now charge you $0.10 if you buy anything plastic until you bring it back to the grocery store empty.
legality of the datacenters aside, I wonder why countries don't at least demand that they're totally carbon neutral or free. it's possible today. it's not like it's sci-fi.
USA is partly a petrostate so regulatory capture is a problem. Negative externalities are not paid for by the polluters. To mitigate the climate catastrophe it would be important to ramp down fossil fuel production in a big hurry.
In Europe this is covered by the emission trading system (EU ETS) and datacenters have to share the same shrinking emissions quota as other industries.
I think most ways of obtaining carbon neutrality are a little bit BS, that's why.
An alternative is what Google is theoretically aiming for: being carbon-free. But they've already started using language describing it as a moonshot or idealistic goal so seems likely they'll abandon that
The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.
You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.
I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.
Sure you can. The datacentre builders just don't want the (fairly modest) extra expense to do so properly. Obviously some preparatory work is required before dumping a lot of extra capacity into the grid.
My state allowed the power utilities to charge a modest fee ($10,000 to $100,000, depending on project size) before a yet-to-be-built data centre could demand a large amount of electricity. The amount of planned data centres went down by an order of magnitude. The truth is that most of the data centre builders (not all) do not want to be responsible citizens and are simply extracting value and wealth from other people, including from the power utilities and grid operators.
In related current news:
Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacen...
Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.23 percent is a bit fucked actually
It's really fucked in the country with the most expensive kWh in all of Europe...
Tax breaks matter more than electricity prices.
shocking how quickly we went from "how can we contain global warming to 1.5C increase?" to "we've (hopefully) unlocked a massive new corporate revenue source, screw everything else"
One more datacenter bro one more datacenter bro please I swear bro one more datacenter and everything will be OK please bro
The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better.
Pluralism? What’s that?
So infinite? There’s no amount of compute that would satisfy everyone’s needs and demands.
I doubt this. It's probably quite high but there is a limit to how much compute you can genuinely use. Just like there's only so much water you're gonna use even if you greatly enjoy Californian almonds.
However, there's probably no limit to energy/electricity we can usefully allocate. And therefore yes, we should in fact provide as much as possible, Dyson spheres and all.
How do you figure that? And if it exceeds what we can generate, a very big number is as unsatisfiable as infinity
Dyson spheres are science fiction. Science fiction is fiction.
Work without effort and thinking machines were also once fiction.
They still are.
Isn’t this exactly the type of thing that a market is designed to discover, which we’re seeing unfold right now?
Yes, maybe they’re building too many right now, who knows. It’s very likely that demand for computation will go up in the future, and EVs are also going to be consuming much more electricity, so all governments better start preparing for more (clean) electrical supply.
That’s all fine as long as the market covers all externalities. It doesn’t
Building data centers sounds like a good bet to make some money in the next decade or so.
That’s not the same as conceding that “everyone should get as much compute as they demand”.
I know that market, and people for that matter don't care, but the environmentalist in me questions the word "needs" in the context of using AI.
I'd be more OK with it if prices weren't subsidized so much and people actually had to pay to ask opus how to pee, then maybe we would realize we don't need beefier models for everything
There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
Training is quite expensive and it does look likely that the American providers have been doing that at a loss.
In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in, and 140W is not exactly a huge amount of power (roughly 50¢ per day if you run it 24/7 at 100% load, which it is very unlikely you will).
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
None of the big providers are profitable. It’s subsidised by overly enthusiastic VCs.
> In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in
Right, people could. But they won’t, because that’s a bloody expensive computer and they don’t need that to ask ChatGPT. That war is lost already.
Subscription to the big players’ services would need to increase massively for that to happen. And the computational cost is only part of the problem; these models also eat a lot of storage and RAM, which is not exactly getting cheaper.
The typical "free" AI or cheap tiers are equivalent in power to a Qwen 3.6 model (which is also much cheaper to run in a hyperscaled situation than on my laptop or PC; a single H200 can host thousands of sessions of a typical chatbot user). There is no evidence the Chinese AI providers are being subsidised either.
You can look at API pricing on a service like OpenRouter (which isn't subsidised) and see pretty readily that it's not expensive to provide lower-tier inference. Higher-tier inference like GPT-5.6-Sol or Opus is expensive - $100 a month plan for realistic usage, and only up from there.
I agree with using smaller models, it's just that the majority of people I know feel like they need the biggest, beefier, behemoth model possible (with the longest thought setting) and consume much more than necessary when a flash or smaller model would be OK. I would also like to be able to use a smaller model, but given ram prices I would have to sell a kidney to buy ram now
Most people who use a free or $20 a month plan are already using smaller models, and the mainstream chatbot services will route requests to a smaller model often without really telling the end user.
You can run Qwen-3.6 on a 32GB card which will set you back about $1400, or $400 of just RAM if you want to run it on a CPU.
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
Well... why else would the major providers now tighten the screws on per-token pricing?
Because they thought they could. Turns out the Chinese and Elon had other plans.
The Chinese providers are just as much getting subsidies from the CCP, and Musk/SpaceX is (indirectly) raiding retirement funds to fund the bonanza.
There is no evidence Chinese providers are getting such subsidised, and in fact apparently Jinping (who presumably knows what the CPP is doing) was surprised when DeepSeek and Qwen generated so much buzz. In China, AI inference is just viewed as another basic utility, much like an e-mail provider or a mobile phone network.
I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?
> I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?
NASDAQ bent their rules to allow SpaceX a (way too early) inclusion into the index and so did MSCI [2] and Russell [3].
Normally, a newly IPO'd stock would have required up to a year of "cooldown" (like the S&P 500 requires) so that stock prices can stabilize. Now though? Billions of dollars in funds are automatically flowing in from retirement accounts into SpaceX and artificially prop up the valuation of this grossly overvalued company. And OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to IPO as soon as possible as well to benefit from the same rules while the markets are still red-hot bullish for anything that can be labeled even remotely related to AI.
Assuming that there will be a catastrophic collapse event in the AI bubble - the triggers can be anything from regulatory issues (no matter if in the US, EU or China), new free models from China cutting off the moat of the Big Three, venture capital running out and forcing realistic pricing or a natural disaster/war wiping out TSMC or RAM factories, interrupting supply for the continued outbuild -, this will directly (and massively) impact retirement accounts.
In addition, even the sell-offs required in ETF rebalancing can have serious economic consequences. Something has to give when SpaceX, OAI and Anthropic all enter.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nasdaq-che...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/msci-confirms...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russell-rebal...
The truly cheap Chinese models are usually the open weights ones so while there may be a training subsidy, the inference prices reflect real costs.
I get what you're saying, but I'm guessing that people asking how to pee is a drop in the bucket compared to the agentic loops being called to rename some variables across a project.
I don’t use AI so this comes across to me as a bit of a culture shock, but is asking AI to rename a variable across project really something AI users are wasting their tokens on? In emacs I can do that with `S-l r r` or `M-x lsp-rename`.
Using AI to do this seems extremely inefficient and wasteful, not to mention improper and unprofessional, and that is looking past the moral implication of training on stolen code and polluting our climate.
The fact is, you wouldn’t be okay with the real prices as well. All indications point to opus not being subsidised but having huge margins.
GLM 5.2 is not subsidised - it is an Opus tier model that costs a small fraction. I doubt you would be okay and all problems would suddenly vanish.
GLM 5.2 isn't quite modern Opus tier, as seen in this comparison where Opus 4.5 scores 4/5 on some coding tasks where GLM 5.2 scores 0/5: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models But yes, GLM 5.2 is cheap.
But the real standout on price is DeepSeek V4 Flash, which competes, more or less, with models in between Sonnet and Haiku. From third-party providers, it costs around $0.09/M, $0.18/M out, compared to $3M/in, $15M/out for Sonnet and $1M/in, $5M/out for Haiku. To get the price of DSv4 (Flash and Pro) so low, DeepSeek did a lot of innovative optimization work that will likely show up in other open weight models in the future.
I think GLM's problem is a lack of vision input.
I bet when hot and cold running water first came out you would have questioned whether people "needed" that as well.
Plainly it was not a "need" since people managed for thousands of years without it.
This is what progress looks like.
Yes, what is that indeed?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pluralism
It seems that HN commenters don’t understand what collectivism is.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/collectivism
It literally has only downsides except some convenience for people who don't want to think and don't want to work.
For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.
However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.
We don't really need the French on the other hand, how could we live without AI?
Yeah, we are not talking about ecological impact of France enough
Yann Le Cun enters the chat...
But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.
So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.
If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).
Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.
Make all DCs provide their own power and suddenly they’d be large amounts of solar and battery in cheap scrubland
A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.
Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.
I'm actually fine with only having access to the AI shaitan when the sun is shining over the datacenter.
Alas I fear we are going to rapidly build a bunch of very hard to maintain and clean up inefficient small nuclear power systems, to power a lot of this. Not next year, no, but soon.
The need for memes knows no bounds. In short order the majority of power usage worldwide will be for compute and newer generations will wonder how it took so long.
Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.
I don't understand why permits are given for new generation that is CO2 positive outside of exceptional cases or when it replaces even worse kind. It's insanity.
> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.
BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
We've been paying hefty excise taxes on gasoline in Europe for decades. Yet nothing has changed. Environmentalists still have the exact same demands and supposedly nothing positive has come from this. It has just made everything more expensive. So what's the point?
[flagged]
If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.
"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding?
I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?
It doesn't have to end the humanity itself. My favorite city being underwater because it's too expensive too pump the water out is already bad enough.
End humanity, maybe not. Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.
More than on the cards, it is already happening.
Fair point! I meant "vastly more painful change than already is happening".
> Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.
Worse than voluntarily inviting masses of incompatible cultures into western countries like we're already doing?
Yes.
And while the populist right love importing incompatible cultures en mass, that will have to stop.
I think I'm much more compatible with my colleagues from the said countries, who are actually nice people, than I am with the rabid fascists having this kind of a take.
It’s anxiety about tipping points more than conspiracy theories. If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity. You may be insulated enough from the direct effects but what about what they trigger? Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices, extreme weather, and dysfunctional migration.
We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Most conspiracy theories think food grows in supermarkets and because they have a job which pays them a good global income they can just pay a bit more.
> If you look at the figures in the various scenarios without even factoring them in: hundreds of millions to billions face food and water insecurity
Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.
Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.
They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.
> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices
False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".
Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.
> False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000. The global average temperature anomaly has risen ~50% in the same period.
> but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is
We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse. For example, AMOC collapse would prevent much of Europe from growing enough food to sustain its population. Not an impossible problem but certainly not an easy one, especially in the context of a world already having to deal with moving fertile regions and mass migrations from North Africa and the Middle East due to drought and extreme heat.
> Unfortunately the third world will suffer the most from climate change. They do indeed already suffer (I’m from Africa originally myself) but emissions have to be reversed, not simply cut to zero, globally to avoid that getting even worse. There would likely be a midpoint where unchecked industrialisation would increase their quality of life but it would be short-lived. Farms aren’t factories and ultimately even the most developed nations will have to reckon with their dependence on nature.
This doesn't count innovation due to technology. For instance, a lot of data centres in the past like 1990's, indirectly contributed in a lot of ways in reducing poverty and deaths - improving supply chain logistics, increasing general efficiency, helping in biological and pharma science. Stopping industrialisation disallows any progress in such fields. In the last 200 years we have made progress in science and tech allowing us to fight back with the environment.
> The inflation-adjusted FAO food price index has risen by 64% since 2000.
That doesn't count income rising, acknowledging you specified inflation adjusted.
You can verify this yourself: try to ask whether the average person today can buy more food with their income or less food. The answer is unambiguously more food because Americans have much more disposable income through social programs, better wages and so on.
> We do know almost exactly what the tipping points are and that they will make the already dire trajectory worse. The uncertainty is simply how much worse.
Source? Please show any source that tells us something like: this much emissions causes this much death in the future with relative confidence. And the tipping point must map to some meaningful tipping point where death rate increases by a big amount.
The only few sources I can see tell me that even if we don't reduce emissions, even if we stall scientific progress we still increase the annual death rate by 2%.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59bf26af29f187c6f3a9f...
> The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.
That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".
> They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
Air conditioning is increasingly necessary in Europe.
Western Europe mostly, for 6 days a year and that's the part of the world that most certainly has the means to install it whenever it decides so.
It's hardly an existential threat to civilization or locally to societies it affects. It's a symptom of things going sough, sure.
*raise the prices
Not to worry.
There are laws in the EU that will save the planet, like drinking from soggy paper straws instead of normal ones and requiring caps stay attached in plastic bottles.
And just to make sure, at least in Poland they now charge you $0.10 if you buy anything plastic until you bring it back to the grocery store empty.
We are safe.
Pretty small if you consider the value they provide, honestly.
And they'll ride the transition to green energy for "free".
Is this value in the room with us?
Do you know what site you're on?
AI produces way more harm then value.
legality of the datacenters aside, I wonder why countries don't at least demand that they're totally carbon neutral or free. it's possible today. it's not like it's sci-fi.
USA is partly a petrostate so regulatory capture is a problem. Negative externalities are not paid for by the polluters. To mitigate the climate catastrophe it would be important to ramp down fossil fuel production in a big hurry.
In Europe this is covered by the emission trading system (EU ETS) and datacenters have to share the same shrinking emissions quota as other industries.
I think most ways of obtaining carbon neutrality are a little bit BS, that's why.
An alternative is what Google is theoretically aiming for: being carbon-free. But they've already started using language describing it as a moonshot or idealistic goal so seems likely they'll abandon that
https://sustainability.google/reports/247-carbon-free-energy...
Carbon offsets are absolutely a scam but you could easily force data centers to provide their own renewable energy.
Man, we are cooked, literally
The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.
You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.
Down. So they are self sufficient in winter and in summer they use excess energy to create green hydrogen.
No idea what you're talking about. My local utility lit up 100MW of solar over the last year alone. Everywhere I look is doing the same.
He's talking about the interconnection queue. You see the 100MW of solar they're wiring up, but not the hundreds of gigawatts in the queue.
I imagine it'd be a lot easier to get a giant datacenter through the queue and connected if said datacenter also generated more than it's own needs with solar and grid scale battery. You'd essentially be asking the grid to act as a backup and sink for spare generation. Avoiding a need for central generation capacity buildout.
Sure you can. The datacentre builders just don't want the (fairly modest) extra expense to do so properly. Obviously some preparatory work is required before dumping a lot of extra capacity into the grid.
My state allowed the power utilities to charge a modest fee ($10,000 to $100,000, depending on project size) before a yet-to-be-built data centre could demand a large amount of electricity. The amount of planned data centres went down by an order of magnitude. The truth is that most of the data centre builders (not all) do not want to be responsible citizens and are simply extracting value and wealth from other people, including from the power utilities and grid operators.
No, wait! The increased productivity will lead to a decoupling of the economy from resources consumption and GHGs emission. Just one more data center.
/s
It’s such a tiring narrative isn’t it ?
Related:
Microsoft latest report shows 25% emissions raised due to AI data centers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870229
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