I recall hearing an interview with a democratic politician (can't recall who), he had this thing: data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy). This seems pretty reasonable to me, if the data centres pay for any build-out of the grid required for their operation and bring online green energy, then they are fine. For the community, worst case they go bust and leave behind an improved grid. Off-grid gas generators are not BYONCE.

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GenerWork 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

>data centres need to BYONCE (Bring Your Own New Clean Energy)

This is just another way of saying "no data centers can be built". The people who want to build data centers don't care what it's powered by, but they choose gas turbines over wind & solar because renewables can't handle the power demands.

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K0nserv 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

That seems like an awfully defeatist attitude. With all the capital investment flowing into AI, there should be plenty of money to research and improve renewables (including fusion, fission, and battery technology) to meet the moment. After all, we need to move past fossil fuels and are already delayed on this path, so AI is a good catalyst (among many) to make progress.

On a meta-level, it's terrible politics for tech companies to roll out a technology that many don't see a need for and fear will take away their livelihood, while at the same time increasing CO2 emissions because renewables are too hard. Of course this course of action runs into massive opposition.

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