Comment by eru

AI's energy use is growing, but it's still a small part of overall energy use.

Data centres use only a small amount of land in the grand scheme of things. You have a lot more land clearing for most other use cases.

Data centres are also more than happy to use electricity from renewable sources, they don't really care where the electricity comes from.

You can run a data centre on mostly solar and wind power plus batteries. If you need a gas-fired peaker plant three times a year to keep the data centres running, well that means your peaker plant still only produces emissions three times a year.