>And they also need to be built somewhere, and that place is probably best where electricity is abundant and/or cheap.
They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
They don't need to be built at the scale they're being built at. That's the problem.
But if you do end up being correct, then the data centers in question will just sit partially or fully idle, using no / a tiny fraction of the electricity and water they could use (which as others have said on this forum, water usage concerns are massively overblown in most data center builds anyway)
I'm also not sure why you think it's a good thing to produce a bunch of electronics using conflict minerals and let them sit idle? Surely you must see the negative "externalities" of this?
Instead of, you know, people who just want to talk to ChatGPT or use Claude models for their software engineering work... I.e. the vast majority of grass-roots AI demand...
According to whom and by what metric? The companies investing vast amounts of capital into them seem to disagree.