Datacentres drive up big tech's carbon emissions to a third of those of France

Tax breaks matter more than electricity prices.

So infinite? There’s no amount of compute that would satisfy everyone’s needs and demands.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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?

End humanity, maybe not. Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.

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.

> 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".

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.

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.