Data centers risk missing US climate goals, especially with AI

But a Goldman Sachs report from May forecasts that AI in particular will be 23% of data center power usage, and data centers in general will be 8% of all US power usage, by 2030 — if the 2024 trend lines continue.

according to my abacus this means about 2% of all US power consumption is projected to be devoted to autocomplete. I feel like I'm living in a shitty boomer comic strip about technology

Oh but don't worry, all of the energy powering all that machine learning is clean and renewable of course, at least that's what I assert beyond evidence. Or even better, evidence in form of a link to some unsourced puff piece blog that also doesn't claim what I just said.

It's not like we could use all that energy for anything else either. If not for the bullshit spam mills soullessly averaging humanity's labors and achievements into vacuous slop to the threnodic tune of myriad gigawatts, those gigajoules would simply evaporate into the cosmic ether. We can't just build distribution networks, can we?

Have you considered the fact that artificial indifference, much like shitcoins before it, is actually driving the construction of clean energy. Because you know, clean energy means literally 100% clean with no downsides so it's good to build even if you waste all of it on stupid shit. Everyone loves getting a giant dam and reservoir where they would otherwise live for the sake of having a robot write ny email for me.

I worked in data centers as a profession and I can unequivocally say that ‘climate goals’ were not part of our power planning.