If the Box Elder datacenter were a state it'd rank #19 in terms of power consumption (78 TWh).
It is correct to say these massive data centers will represent a significant percentage of US power consumption when built out.
Attacking them for size is a bit like saying that freight trains are bad because they’re heavy.
Efficient how? Efficiency is a meaningless term without a metric attached. A train is efficient in terms of CO2 used per kg transported, it's not efficient in terms of time to transport.
> Attacking them for size
I didn't attack them for size, I attacked them for energy consumption. And that has multiple knock on effects. From climate change (since a lot of these data centers are being powered by natural gas), to local air pollution, to increased local and regional energy prices. If you are consuming 9GW of natural gas that's 9GW worth of physical gas that's been consumed. Increased demand == higher prices for anything that uses natural gas, heating and power generation come to mind.
I don't care so much if a data center is huge, what I care about is the resources it consumes to operate. Similar to how I don't care how time efficient a private jet is for the wealthy to fly on. I care more about of CO2 inefficient private jets are.
Just some napkin maths. The best combined cycle gas powerplant (Nat gas + steam) have an efficiency around 60 %. So 9 GW of electricity requires enough natural gas for 15 GW (9/0.6 = 15). Natural gas is about 10 kWh/m^3, so in 1 hour, we need 15E9/10E3 = 15E6 m^3 of natural gas. In BTU this is 5.118E10 BTU. A year has 8760 hours, 4.483E14 BTU or 4.483E8 MMBTU in a year.
According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56380&src=%E... the average Nat gas residential consumption in USA is around 80 MMBTU. So these 9 GW of electricity for datacenter s represent the average Nat gas consumption of 5.6 million home in USA.
Meanwhile from a local perspective the fact that a very large datacentre next door is hypothetically aggregating what would have been several other data centres, mostly built elsewhere, is not so reassuring. (Though the other side of that coin is that from the builders' point of view it may be politically easier to get a given amount of capacity built as a few very large plants in places which are less likely or less able to object: regulatory efficiency, distinct from energy efficiency.)
And also conversely, if the mega-DCs (deca-giga-DCs?) really are markedly more efficient, and if they do aggregate lots of new capacity, most especially if they do also end up aggregating existing capacity, that will worsen problems of competition and market concentration in the cloud computing market, at least once the money spigot is turned off again and it's no longer the case that any idiot can get financing for a new datacentre.
If there is demand for it, it's "socially justified". We don't live in a command economy, and thankfully, there's not a panel of woke elders deciding what we get to build. One of the great things about capitalism (indeed, the entire purpose of the thing) is that it does a great job of balancing supply to demand.
The decision of whether or not to build one big datacenter, or a billion teeny datacenters is also well solved by competition, and doesn't need our help.