Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries
techradar.com
techradar.com
Google and Microsoft gain from the economy of scale. With many more companies, the overall costs would be higher, and no doubt some people would decide to not use this service.
That's the heart of the Jevon's Paradox.
They also have programs in place for e-waste recycling and safe refrigerant destruction where it is available - things that you will not see in colocation-type facilities.
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.
My instincts tell me that because the cloud is so easy to spin up new computation resources, that we're just using that much more of it. If a company had to buy the hardware, buy the licensing, buy the time of the system administrator, would they scale up as large?
The cloud has driven efficiency gains. But those gains have been consumed and, under the premise above, even exceeded. The cloud might very well be contributing to more energy use than it would have otherwise.
Unsure on this, of course. Just a gut feeling. It would be interesting if someone did an actual study on this.
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.
Fortunately, no armies yet.
Come to think of it 2003 was only a couple years before Gmail would change web apps forever
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40859993
A click bait headline vs. content but a concern documented by the company.
If every country had to create their own version of those products we would end up having still more power consumption - considering that not every one would be able to have the kind of professionals that Google and Microsoft have.
The original twitter post just says "More electricity than many countries". The fact that Google and Microsoft consume the same order magnitude of electricity as Nigeria (population 220 million), Ireland (population 5 million), Ecuador (18 million), Slovakia (5 million), Iceland (population 0.4 million), really just speaks the vast inequality in the world, even amongst countries.
It's interesting and relevant that Microsoft and Google are now "country scale", in terms of energy production. But when you realize that US energy consumption in 2023 was 4000TWh (MS and Google apparently each used 24), you realize just how non-serious this comparison is. The comparison can be thought provoking, but the actual results aren't particularly meaningful.
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.
> Amazon is the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original target of 2030.
https://bep.brookfield.com/press-releases/bep/brookfield-and...
Much more efficient to do this through the tax code. (Use corporate taxes to do what you want instead of delegating our energy mix to an ad company.)
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 be green, the others are not and you can seriously slow down the transition.
I'd prefer that those nuclear plans and renewable farms are used for better purposes as hospitals, industries, homes...
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?
They should raise taxes, especially for large coorparations and in higher income brackets.
Google and Microsoft are large corporations. Their employees and investors are high income. OP proposes curtailing their growth. That reduces those taxes. That’s why OP’s suggestion is a false economy.
Energy, in this context, isn’t a zero sum game. Tax Google and Microsoft more and use that to pay for more power.
If some companies care enough about their image to pay extra to buy green energy, that's good! It makes that production more profitable, and encourages more such production to be built faster. Why are you trying to disincentivize that with "greenwashing" slurs?
I'm perfectly fine that we start big plans to build many new nuclear and renewable plants, but __today__ we need to emit less CO2, now. CO2 just add up in the atmosphere and don't degrade in the time we have.
SO, in the quota we need to respect, I prefer to ensure that the today capacity we have of "clean energy" are used for a proper usage better than allocating the current clean, and upcoming clean ones to some Google servers that are used to generate AI images for fun.
If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon.
You’re proposing capping economic growth to save the planet. Admirable. But with tremendous, almost guaranteed, capacity for backlash.
Empirically, growing economies green faster because while we should treat climate change as an existential crisis, we don’t, we treat it as a luxury.
> If your house is on fire you don't use the water you have to fill up your pool, you actually need to turn off the fire, even if you will have more water soon
The house isn’t on fire. It’s settling wrong. It won’t burn us in minutes but bury us in decades. The analogy is in quitting your job to start repairs even though you don’t have the cash on hand to finish them.
Google and Microsoft are clearly more effective users of energy than many other commercial users, i.e. creating more value per watt spent. In a situation where you're going to snap your fingers and killing companies or entire industries by refusing to sell them electricity, you don't want to go for the efficient energy users. You want to go after the ones where the energy is adding the least marginal value.
Maybe there's an argument in there somewhere around the lossiness of transmission, but I have no idea what it would be.
This doesn't make sense. If big players are eating up all the renewable sources, then the renewable sources are making money hand over fist and are encouraged to expand. The market forces should speed up overall production of renewables, not slow it down.
Adding more renewable on top help having... more renewable, that's great, but if you don't have a clear plan to remove the fossil fuel (meaning closing down coal, gas, oil sources) you don't change the emissions pathway.
Why do you assume that the tax incidence falls on investors, rather than on customers and/or employees? With sales tax or VAT people tend to automatically assume 100% passthrough (so that the incidence falls completely on customers/consumers) even though they're also collected by companies. In reality taxes are borne by a combination of customers/employees/owners, with proportions determined by their relative price elasticities, rather than by who lawmakers appointed to collect the tax.
And any green tax would be trivial for Google to add as a line item on invoices: it’s so defensible.
That depends entirely on where the money comes from.
If the company does not reduce profit, then yes, they must raise prices and/or reduce employee salaries.
But if we are willing to put the taboo topic of reducing profits on the table, profit can just be reduced without any impact to customers or employees. I realize this kind of talk is blasphemy, but it clearly needs to be done.
We’ve capped profits in various industries before. The benefits didn’t flow to customers and employees equally, they flowed to specific employees and specific customers. (You also see R&D grind to a halt.)
There isn’t a clean technical solution to this social problem, that of redistributing wealth indirectly. At the end of the day, if you want investors’ profits, you have to take them directly.
Because they have huge investor surplus
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 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.
Our grandchildren will be able to live regardless of where these companies source their power from.
This ignores externalities.
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...
If and only if those other companies are able and willing to produce the required energy mix, then the desired mix used downstream can be achieved. Obviously the only organizations which can make such a change are energy providers.
The energy provider could say "why should I be the one eating the cost of providing sustainable energy?".
The ones consuming energy also need to take their responsibilities. "When we think that it would suffice people didn't buy it for it not to sell!" (Coluche).
In fact, this is a collective issue we are all part of (including as individuals: we use the services consuming energy).
Where did you get that from? He could also force the additional cost to the companies.
>The ones consuming energy also need to take their responsibilities. "When we think that it would suffice people didn't buy it for it not to sell!" (Coluche).
You can not buy energy which doesn't exist. If less renewable energy is produced than the consumer needs, the legally required energy mix is impossible. Obviously the alonly person which can change which energy is produced is the provider.
>In fact, this is a collective issue we are all part of (including as individuals: we use the services consuming energy).
There is exactly one group of people responsible for the energy mix. The energy providers. Obviously any change can only come from them and demanding change from anyone, without first demanding change from the providers is obviously ridiculous.