- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/74728400
Anthropic struck a deal with a Texas-based energy company for gas-fired engines meant to provide AI data centers with electricity.
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this is beginning of their crimes
It’s hilarious that this is not necessary at all. There are many data centers that use fully renewable energy, recycle 99% of their water etc. They are a bit more expensive to build. Like making them fully “green” would be a tiny portion of the budget (which obviously mostly goes to ungodlily expensive memory and chips).
Like if the US was a minimally serious country, it would have regulations prohibiting this kind of stuff cause the alternative is just a bit more expensive and is already super feasible and easy to do. There are whole companies that their entire business is building green renewable data centers.
These US AI guys are just ghouls and I suspect they actually want to destroy the world? Idk.
Like there is NO reason other than evilness to not pollute the soil and groundwater around them, to not recycle the water used for cooling, to not use wind turbines and solar panels and batteries…. Literally NO reason.
Are you aware of the interconnection queue bottleneck?
The issue feeding this is not companies being unwilling to pay slightly more money for renewables. They’re throwing wads of cash around hand-over-fist; if that got results, they’d do it without hesitation.
The bigger factor is that the federal government is making it take >3-5 years to process the permitting to wire up new renewable sources to the grid.
When it comes to “use fully renewable energy”, keep in mind that as long as we aren’t 100% renewable that energy demand is being made up elsewhere with fossil fuels.
I’d still much rather have that than this, but even all the “normal” grid power that is being used on chatbots has got to come from somewhere.
Yes, let’s kill the planet to create something nobody wants. Peak capitalism.
something nobody wants
OpenAI has 1.2 billion weekly active users so I’m not sure how accurate that is 🤔
Anthropic have far fewer users, but they’re focused on a smaller number of big customers (large companies, etc) rather than individuals.
So just like Microsoft, adding copilot to everything including notepad and paint, does NOT mean people want it. Just because the website has a chat with a shitty bot section, doesn’t mean people want it. It’s all for artificial inflation of stocks.
They have only about 50M paying subscribers. Spotify has over 300M, same with Netflix. People use it because it’s convenient (search is mostly broken now) and free. I would like to see how many people and companies would use it if they actually had to pay for the environmental damage it’s causing. I think most people that do use it would happily go back to the time before AI. It’s useful but it’s definitely not the revolution we were promised.
“Last month, environmental nonprofit Sierra Club estimated that upcoming AI data centers could release 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, wiping out nearly 15 years worth of greenhouse gas reduction efforts.”
That’s… disappointing and impressive.
The linked article without paywall.
If you click through the link it is that the us power sector is estimated to emit that much by 2030. Awful journalism by futurism to report that as “AI” will.
That’s only half the quote
The US power sector would emit 2.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, after factoring in planned AI projects, which is 618 million tons more than 2025 levels, or about a 42% increase.
So the estimated total increase is 618 million tons
The bulk of the expected emissions by 2030 would come from sources that are not directly linked to the grid, often built by tech companies to avoid the long wait for a connection. These could exceed 460 million tons, Fisher said, roughly the same as the annual emissions of Mexico.
So over 460 million tons of the 618 estimate is primarily datacenters, nearly 3x of the rest of the country, which is only using 158 tons more.
Sure, data centres using off grid generation seems to be a large source of increase of emissions, but calling a part of 460 million tonnes (I assume that given that it says often built for tech companies means not all are) 2100 million tonnes is bad journalism. Inflating numbers when the true ones are bad enough just hurts your credibility.
The Bloomberg article (archive link) cites several studies that make different projections about the amount emissions will increase, but all agree that the cause is additional fossil-fuel-based power generation for AI data centers. There’s consensus that the cause of severely increased US emissions is AI data centers. No one is suggesting it comes from anywhere else.
They write with such a heavy anti AI bias, that i can’t trust anything they puplish about the subject any longer. I am critical of AI myself, but i don’t want journalism to uncritically engage with any subject.
