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Comment by pj_mukh | Hacker News Reader

To OP's point, I am curious why a tech forward crowd would consider AI-training/inference anywhere close to a significant contributor of greenhouse gasses? Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots [1]

I think AI is a convenient foil to get people whipped up and out to vote, but I know HN is not the forum for that. The technical data clearly says that closed-loop water coolers don't use that much water and energy use is a function of a counties energy infrastructure choices not the existence of demand.

But instead we're going straight to destruction of planet as the exact verbiage, which seems way out of whack.

[1]: https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...

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Are currently, but at the scale AI corps are trying to deploy at they'll be the largest user of electricity.

But we have figured out how to create electricity without destroying the planet. It's true that we need to actually do that, and that we are to a large degree not doing so at the moment. But that's a problem we already needed to solve. It does make it more important to solve that problem, but it also improves the incentives to solving it (electricity is more valuable now).

"largest user of electricity"

Compared to what? More than all heavy industry? All residential usage for a given sector? Seems like a tall ask requiring some modeling.

Yep they think they'll use more than all heavy industry, which they also think they'll make obsolete. The plans are for something like, a DC in every city that each uses as much electricity as the whole state currently does. Yes it's completely insane.

They basically undo all the reduce renew recycle efforts we've been doing since the 90's

Reduce will never happen unless population falls. Not in a big way.

It should be: reuse, recycle, renewable. First try to reuse and make things more reusable. Then try to recycle. Last, substitute renewable for non renewable sources for things like energy.

And not even then with private planes being just as bad

> Datacenters are like a tiny blip on emissions plots

Maybe in 2023, but what about now?

You think we’ve built that many data centers next to coal fired power plants that the emissions have gotten anywhere close to the emissions of all the iron smelters and the billions of people that commute in gas cars?

We could triple the data centers since 2023 and run them all on coal or natural gas and then maybe they’d even show up as a significant slice on these pie charts.

Our bubbles have blinded us to the scale of the real problem.

I'm curious what part of the charts would data centers fall under?

I'm assuming it would be under the Energy emissions category, but I didn't find anything particular around data centers or "technology" or "internet" or something like that.

Would it fall under "Electricity and heat"? Or just general "Buildings"? or "Commercial buildings"? Or am I way off base?

A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.

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