- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/74728400
Anthropic struck a deal with a Texas-based energy company for gas-fired engines meant to provide AI data centers with electricity.
It’s hilarious that this is not necessary at all. There are many data centers that use fully renewable energy, recycle 99% of their water etc. They are a bit more expensive to build. Like making them fully “green” would be a tiny portion of the budget (which obviously mostly goes to ungodlily expensive memory and chips).
Like if the US was a minimally serious country, it would have regulations prohibiting this kind of stuff cause the alternative is just a bit more expensive and is already super feasible and easy to do. There are whole companies that their entire business is building green renewable data centers.
These US AI guys are just ghouls and I suspect they actually want to destroy the world? Idk.
Like there is NO reason other than evilness to not pollute the soil and groundwater around them, to not recycle the water used for cooling, to not use wind turbines and solar panels and batteries…. Literally NO reason.
Are you aware of the interconnection queue bottleneck?
The issue feeding this is not companies being unwilling to pay slightly more money for renewables. They’re throwing wads of cash around hand-over-fist; if that got results, they’d do it without hesitation.
The bigger factor is that the federal government is making it take >3-5 years to process the permitting to wire up new renewable sources to the grid.
When it comes to “use fully renewable energy”, keep in mind that as long as we aren’t 100% renewable that energy demand is being made up elsewhere with fossil fuels.
I’d still much rather have that than this, but even all the “normal” grid power that is being used on chatbots has got to come from somewhere.