A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play.
The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.
Uhh, soo many datacenters run off wind. So this is pretty disingenuous
Tell me about it. In the Netherlands wind farms are built, and, on paper, these datacenter companies buy up all of the energy from them. Meanwhile, the reason why these wind farms were built is to burn less fossil fuels, but that won’t work now because of all the extra energy consumption.
You mean wind turbines.
This is a good thing. So wind turbine companies take that money and use it to build more wind turbines
What you call a good thing, I call green washing.
If everything is running on renewables, cool. Until then, there’s still the opportunity cost.
Power is only part of it. Concrete production is a huge greenhouse gas source.