Comment by eru
4 hours ago
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.
They use a small amount of land per MW used. The fact that space isn't a constraining factor in power demand, and demand for AI compute seems to be insatiable at the moment, means that there is less of a "land constraint" to use even more energy. If they actually required a lot of land they would be less viable and AI progress would be slower IMO. Just means even more data centre's will be built - this is where the Jevon's paradox actually is IMO. Seeing it in real life already with these things taking a significant portion of power demand and projected to take even more.
As you use more and more land as well the ability to provision renewables decreases - in general renewable power needs more land/resources per energy produced. You can't just mine it out of the ground; they just aren't as dense of a form of energy. Which means we either build less data centres to make room for renewables and transmission infrastructure associated with them, or more likely with lax regulation builders switch to more dense power sources (e.g. gas peakers, generators, etc) even if it is for supplementation.
I can see a future where data center wants are put ahead of communities paying tax on said infrastructure. In fact I think its happening in some places already.
Solar power is currently the cheapest power anyone can add to the grid in most places.
Sure, if you conjure the materials for the data centers out of thin air.
They also consume deinking water, because it's too expensive to make them with closed loop cooling.
Can that myth about data centres using so much water die already, please?