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Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

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Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#31

Post by Brechreiz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12
edhelas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google, Microsoft and others are directly buying electricity from nuclear and renewable sources, doing some major greenwashing this way. https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpow... By doing that they force all the others to rely on the "other" sources (gas, coal...) and not replace fast enough those ones with clean sources. The production is physically limited, if you have the money and power to b…

> production is physically limited By what? We could easily sustain higher production rates for solar, wind and nuclear. The constraints are mainly bureaucratic. > prefer that those nuclear plans and renewable farms are used for better purposes as hospitals, industries, homes How do you aim to pay for them?

>How do you aim to pay for them?

They should raise taxes, especially for large coorparations and in higher income brackets.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#34

Post by tantalor »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #30
prepend wrote: post #25

This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries. Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

That ain't new. East India company had essentially private armies.

Carnegie Steel had the Pinkertons

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#35

Post by Brechreiz »

gottorf wrote: post #28
szundi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He meant a nice life

In fact, they will likely be able to live a better life if everyone was free to choose an energy source that makes economical sense to them.

Why??

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#36

Post by spyspy »

The article doesn’t break out Google/MS proper from their cloud offerings, so it’s not really fair to say they’re using more power like the folks at these companies are choosing to do this. They rent compute and their customers are using a lot more of it. If google just said “we’re not renting out GPUs to save the environment” people would just shift to a competitor.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#37

Post by Devasta »

Depends on what they are doing. Consuming a large amount of energy for cloud platforms isn't the worst, as that'd be done by the customers directly if the cloud didbt exist after all.

Using it on generative AI on the other hand is burning huge amounts of energy, manpower and effort on a robot that advises how to cook spaghetti in gasoline for flavor. A complete waste.

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#38

Post by Ekaros »

grecy wrote: post #2

Given how wildly profitable they are, we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources, where X approaches 100%. This would be a jobs program that would also help the planet. Win win. Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.

Is that X% in moment or in total? Which is critical distinction. Overall might not be too helpful is renewables at time massively over produce. Electricity is fungible only in moment. And storage is nowhere close...

You could have someone getting paid to waste electricity during over-production while this wasted amount will somehow still count when coal is being burned...

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#39

Post by infecto »

prepend wrote: post #25

This makes sense as their market cap and revenues are also larger than many countries. Max Barry wrote a book in 2003 called Jennifer Government [0] about a near future where companies were so big they had their own armies and intelligence agencies. It seems like we’re getting close to that point. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Government

We are getting close to companies with armies and intelligence agencies at the scale of governments?

Re: Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

#40

Post by HumblyTossed »

mrweasel wrote: post #19
grecy wrote: post #2

Given how wildly profitable they are, we should be passing laws that they must produce X % of their power needs from renewable sources, where X approaches 100%. This would be a jobs program that would also help the planet. Win win. Investors would make slightly less money in the short term, but our grandchildren will be able to live. I think that is a good trade off.

This could/should(?) be fixed by taxing CO2 emissions. I'm not sure what it works in e.g. the US, but some countries have this stupid idea that electricity prices have a build in CO2 tax, but applied to all consumptions, not just that produced by CO2 emitting sources. Let's say Microsoft could save 25% on their electricity bill by consuming power from wind farms, I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training w…

> I think they'd work out a way to do more AI training when the wind is blowing and scale down when more power is delivered from coal.

Maybe they could even use AI to help them figure out when to do that.

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