I do really dislike that AFAIK almost all of these are being powered via burning fossil fuels. Any way you slice it, it's going to mean that locals end up paying higher energy bills.
The first problem, in order to reverse a chemical reaction, you need to provide at least the offsetting released energy of the initial reaction. That means for CO2 you need to provide at least as much energy as was released when the carbon oxidized in the first place.
The second problem is that the CO2 is diluted in the atmosphere. Consider the amount of energy needed to remove salt from ocean water, it's not simple.
It just takes a lot of energy to that what was done by burning fossils in the first place.
This is only a problem if AI won't develop cheap carbon neutral energy sources, like fusion or advanced fission, or more efficient solar with cheap grid-scale batteries.
Well, it was true in the 90s, and it's still true today. Once climate change becomes important enough (that is, causing actual significant damage to important, wealthy countries), it takes just one such country to start a stratospheric aerosol injection project, or, if space launch costs become low enough, put a sunshade between Earth and the Sun. Such solutions have their own risks, of course. But if climate change really becomes bad, they will be tried. And from what I have read, they have a good change of succeeding.
What qualifies as a rich nation anyway? Europe seems pretty rich, and they're melting. One would think the time is now.
They are still not melting enough. Most of the negative consequences of current summer heatwaves can be pretty much solved by installing US-style ubiquitous air conditioning.
An extremely wealthy acquaintance in my local circle is happy to endlessly debate whether climate change is ACTUALLY real or just scientists carving out job security, while flying out for monthly ski holidays wherever there's nice snow in the world when it gets a bit muggy at home.
It’s silly to pretend that technology is anything other than a double edged sword.
I'll grant you social media and advertising, but the other two are not new, and were way worse in the past.
Or to spell it out more clearly, the sarcasm has nothing to do with the truth value of the claim (I’m not making an assertion in either direction).
Sure, millions of people are going to die due to climate change, and that's going to impact the company's profitability, but by then your stock options will have already vested - so that's a problem for someone else!
Personally I will forgive them the Datacenter carbon if they are willing to stop flying private jets.
The rest of us, who might be on green tariffs usually get a commitment that on average almost all our energy comes from renewables. When supply is short then I'm the one who's paying for gas generation rather than the company who has committed to greenwashing. But that also drives investment in renewable generation, in the UK renewables have gone from 2% of power generation in 1991 to around 50% now.
From a climate change perspective, what happens at one particular moment doesn't matter -- it's CO2 emissions globally over time that do.
They are also building solar farms independent of the data centers. People hate it and are against it.
They just built a Costco which turned some cornfields into a giant warehouse. No signs, no protests, no complaints at the city council meetings.
Not everyone is a software developer.
What if the cornfield owners got paid market rates for the power generated when that land is given over to solar? This should be (and ChatGPT agrees) much more profitable given that it is vastly more energy efficient.
Realistically the solution to NIMBYism is to pay the neighbours, but that's not really practical.
NIMBYism isn't rational, it's a manifestation of fear of change, even if they past state of affairs was worse than the future one. I live in a city where the anti-datacentre campaign isn't about some pleasant locale, but a disused toxic industrial land in a steel-mill complex over half a km away from any actual homes.
The corn field is a known quantity.
Does that seems unreasonable? We already grow more than enough food in this country and surely we're not getting 300x more value from the corn.