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
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
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.
A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.
Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.
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.
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 terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
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.