Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 121 posts

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

#31

Post by trollbridge »

ch4s3 wrote: post #14
timschmidt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by throw-the-towel »

simianwords wrote: post #22
black_puppydog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 terrai…

[flagged]

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

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

#33

Post by Matticus_Rex »

timschmidt wrote: post #24
ch4s3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#34

Post by ekidd »

simianwords wrote: post #23
amarcheschi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#35

Post by barnabee »

scottcha wrote: post #25
Muromec wrote: post #6

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.

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

#36

Post by amarcheschi »

trollbridge wrote: post #26
amarcheschi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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

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

#37

Post by kergonath »

simianwords wrote: post #22
black_puppydog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 terrai…

[flagged]

> 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".

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

#38

Post by kergonath »

throw-the-towel wrote: post #32
simianwords wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

More than on the cards, it is already happening.

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

#39

Post by stalfie »

simianwords wrote: post #22
black_puppydog wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 terrai…

[flagged]

"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?

Post reply on HN