Comment by rvz

Cryptocurrencies never needed so much data centers as there are many alternatives to the worst one (Bitcoin) that improved their performance and there are environmentally friendly alternatives.

LLMs on the other hand have an insatiable requirement for trillions of dollars of data centers, causing memory prices to skyrocket, companies to layoff staff to increase capital expenditure on even more data centers instead of improving the software to run these models.

There are no 'environmentally friendly' alternatives to LLMs and this tax tells you everything you need to know why it exists.