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

theguardian.com

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

#71

Post by hdgvhicv »

silver_silver wrote: post #53
simianwords wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 migratio…

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.

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

#72

Post by hdgvhicv »

xienze wrote: post #61
throw-the-towel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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.

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

#73

Post by Laurel1234 »

Muromec wrote: post #7
defrost wrote: post #5

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... 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 2…

23 percent is a bit fucked actually

It's really fucked in the country with the most expensive kWh in all of Europe...

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

#74

Post by fulafel »

amazingamazing wrote: post #43

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.

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

#75

Post by Laurel1234 »

jezzamon wrote: post #45
amazingamazing wrote: post #43

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.

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.

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

#76

Post by hdgvhicv »

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.

Down. So they are self sufficient in winter and in summer they use excess energy to create green hydrogen.

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

#77

Post by chvid »

Laurel1234 wrote: post #73
Muromec wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#78

Post by mschuster91 »

trollbridge wrote: post #63
mschuster91 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

#79

Post by kubb »

blfr wrote: post #69
kubb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#80

Post by runarberg »

wickedsight wrote: post #52
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

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.

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