this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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Datacenter != AI
If you are using the internet for anything with cloud storage, you are contributing to datacenter growth. And that includes nearly everyone using social media.
Sure but energy use per datacenters was on a downward trend before ai, then it went the other way hard
Except the demand for new data centers is driven entirely by the capacity constraints of the current AI models.
"Why are you mad at my five ton diseal SUV when you just adopted a pet chihuahua? They both emit carbon!"
I'm not sure that's true. Every company uses storage, and every growing company needs more. But very few companies are training generative AIs.
You're comparing mountains to molehills. That's before you consider improvements in storage and compression relative to demands for space, or the degree to which our storage capacity "needs" are predicated on the voracious appetite of AI models and their unwanted output. Or, for that matter, the inefficient distribution of data and proliferation of spam data that predates it.
Most US Growth Now Rides on AI—And Economists Suspect a Bubble
The expansion in demand is entirely being driven by the expansion in AI capacity.
That article doesn't say what you imply it does. Companies may be using ChatGPT to grow, but that doesn't mean they are training AIs.
And the distinction is critical to energy usage. Training a new AI uses a lot of energy. Querying an existing AI uses far less.
It's the MAG7 that's driving growth. And they're all fixated on training AI in some capacity
It costs $5 for each 10s video generation, based on Azure's published rates for the first Sora model.
That's presumably a lot of energy.
The MAG7 operate large and growing cloud services, so their datacenter costs would grow even without any AI training.
And charging $5 for a video query does not mean the query uses $5 of energy. The query is priced to recoup training costs that were already incurred.
Yes but data center growth prior to AI was manageable. There isn't a grid on the planet (except maybe china?) which can support the growth of AI data centers.
These people have to plan energy needs on a 10-20 year life cycle, not 2. It's the 2 that's the problem.
The bitcoin miners have hopefully dropped off because they were chewing up gobs of energy too.
I thought they were totally just using flare gas and renewables ;) 🙄
But my understanding for real is that ai data centers are just the same hardware as buttcoin but more of it and organized. The venture capitalists finally got what they wanted, blowing their wad on Nvidia.
china is also building lots of coal plants to sustain the datacenters.
China already has 200% the capacity relative to their demand. They've been growing solar fast enough to beat very high 8%+ electricity consumption growth last year, and can probably keep the pace.
This would be 99% of businesses at this point. Stop using AI to make memes and clickbait videos.
I'm perfectly fine with Lemmy being limited to 100% renewable power. Don't burn coal or LNG for me.