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That triples the cost of the data centre per unit of compute.
that could still be cheaper than actually sucking CO2 out of the air --- or not, let the market do it's thing
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that could still be cheaper than actually sucking CO2 out of the air --- or not, let the market do it's thing
A self sufficney solar, battery, data centre is about 70% cost on the data centre and 10% on the battery.
I understand that singling out datacenters specifically isn't really fair, but if they start accounting for 25% of the grid, then I have to pay for everybody's dancing JD Vance gifs even I don't look at them, at which point the line between communism and free market gets a bit blurry to me.
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> 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…
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?
Actually a lot has changed -- the world passed peak oil and the benzine cars are practically done, while a lot of generation is now "green". It isn't enough to get it to C02 negative territory so far, but saying it's nothing is a bit counterfactual.
If you want to burn shit, you need to either not release CO2 somehow while doing it or suck it back from the the air somewhere and that second part isn't happening, because the emissions are mispriced.
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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 dat…
There's a years long queue for every US grid.
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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 accoun…
The aggressive mix would probably have some SpaceX in it, but claiming SpaceX is “stealing retirement funds” is simply not true. It isn’t. I checked my dad’s retirement funds and my own and there isn’t any SpaceX in there (there should be in mine, since a goal date 26 years from now should be an aggressive mix).
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There's a years long queue for every US grid.
The queue is no longer a year long here once they started charging those study fees.
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…
“Microsoft’s oldest hyperscale data center in the Netherlands, a series of interconnected warehouses along the A7 in Middenmeer, currently consumes over 1 percent of all Dutch electricity
[…]
At the end of 2024, data centers already accounted for 4.6 percent of the Netherlands’ total electricity consumption, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) calculated late last year. Grid operators expect this to grow to around 15 percent of all electricity used by 2030”
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…
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"
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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"
its not shocking to me; in the end, those with capital get their way... whatever we all democracy nowadays has been lobbied and electioneered-by-money to hell and back with no end in sight
but what's surprising is the speed at which we collectively "forgot" that we are facing an potentially existential crisis. it wasn't long ago that Google had its emissions mitigation progress in the footer of its home page, it's been replaced with a "use our AI" link
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its not shocking to me; in the end, those with capital get their way... whatever we all democracy nowadays has been lobbied and electioneered-by-money to hell and back with no end in sight
yeah, it's the way of the world these days but what's surprising is the speed at which we collectively "forgot" that we are facing an potentially existential crisis. it wasn't long ago that Google had its emissions mitigation progress in the footer of its home page, it's been replaced with a "use our AI" link
i feel like mchluhan (medium is the message) and guy debord (society of the spectacle) were so prescient...