All that wasted energy for products no one asked for that are objectively trash.
100%. I work in tech and my entire career has not benefitted the public in any way. Its often even actively harmful. If someone knocked out the entire internet somehow and handed me a rake, the world would be a better more productive place, and psychologists say we’d all be happier.
The cloud bad. It was all a lie. Self hosting is more energy efficient and cost effective
Private cloud is better than public cloud for different goals.
Here, though, DC costs can be swept under the rug.
OPex (operational expendeture) vs CAPex (capital expenditures) reporting rules steer companies toward going into the cloud, which is classified as Opex. Running your own DC is classified as capex. Capex makes shareholders very unhappy when expensive investments in infrastructure are bought. If the government wanted to, it could change the rules such that cloud company fees counted as CAPex, and the cloud companies would drastically shrink.
OPex (operational expende\iture) vs CAPex (capital expenditures) reporting rules steer companies toward going into the cloud, which is classified as Opex. Running your own DC is classified as capex. Capex makes shareholders very unhappy when expensive investments in infrastructure are bought. If the government wanted to, it could change the rules such that cloud company fees counted as CAPex, and the cloud companies would drastically shrink.
With AI deployments continuing to increase, US data center energy grew at an increasing rate, hitting 176TWh by 2023, representing 4.4 percent of total US electricity consumption
Have no fear, Except for Texas with its mismanaged power grid, we have coal plants we can turn back on to take care of that. And coal miners we were retraining for other jobs can stop that retraining and get back to work in the coal mines. The US has an a functionally infinite supply of coal, so everyone just calm down.
The cat pics and government propoganda stream will continue to flow even if we have to turn our earth into a flaming greenhouse gasball to do it.
