The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It's Almost Incomprehensible

I guess we would be 30 years from stable scalable fusion reactions?

Who cares about fusion? There was a study in the late 90's stating that if only 10% of the capital put towards oil research, exploration, extraction, etc, annually, was put towards renewable energies it would catapult the research output by a factor of 30, by year.

We could have, by now, moved completely towards renewables for everyday life needs and start towards producing more energy we could ever need and put that excess towards greater achievements.

I’ve been cynical about them for years but there’s been enough interesting milestones crossed lately that I wonder if an injection of AI money wouldn’t just do the trick.

They'd really love it if we could be dead and making money for them. They live in hope!

Yes, but they also don't care if the grand majority of us are dead.

They have what they need.

That's why most have bunkers.

Fuckerbergs is in Hawaii.

They just want us to make money. They don't give a fuck if you die.

Not really. They are actively trying to circumvent consumers as a step to making money. That is what the entire AI-circlejerk bubble is about.

That's funny because I would prefer them dead and I bet there are more who think like me than there are who think like them. Maybe they should start getting frightened. I'm not saying we should kill them, but I wouldn't bat an eye if they just dropped dead. And I bet not much would be lost for humanity after we sat down and made a plan how to redistribute their wealth and equity.

They still need us to advance AI until it's able to self-improve. That's why they're pumping so much money into scaling. Once they have that, we'll have lost all leverage - that's what their evaluations are based on.

I don't think the current approach can achieve this, but it looks like they'll do their damndest to try. They've already prepared for the worst, and if they can choose between X years before everything goes to shit, or X minus ? years before it goes to shit BUT they get AGI to play with in their bunkers...

He was never about that.

He said he was, but actions speak louder and if he ever was he'd be promoting Hydrogen-electric with a Hydrogen ICE transition* instead of battery electric which isn't sustainable and is environmentally disastrous in its own way.

*Diesel ICE can be converted to Hydrogen ICE (note: they still need ~5-10% diesel, so it's not a forever technology) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/engineering/research-technology/is/converting-diesel-engines-to-run-on-hydrogen

Too used to money insulating from reality.

maybe they are bitter because they cant live forever and want to take us out. Make as much money out of us as they can, live lavish life and leave everything in ruins after they are done. If we let them, we deserve it. But i dont think we should let them.

Anyone that can should do at least some act of resistance, even if it feels meaningless. Throwing a fucking rock at datacenter physically affects nothing, but symbolically it has value. Imagine 100 people throwin a rock at datacenter, while still likely doenst do anything it would be big message to everyone else. Though it would likely also result in getting into trouble, so everyone should also do some risk evaluation what they can get away with. But simple graffitti could also be effective or even just plain speaking your mind loudly about things.

And most importantly, what the enemy fears most is our unity. So everyone should definitely do everything they can to improve that. Together we stand, separated we die.

They know that things are going to be shit. They just wasn't the nicest yacht to live on when it does.

See they think they're doing Human Instrumentality from NGE

That they will discover true AGI in their lifetime, and then use it to become a living god.

Ok how much is beef farming accountable for

Can you name a moment in time when regular people did stand in solidarity and revolt against something that wasn’t already at the point of causing them grave, direct, unavoidable, and consistent harm?

So, requiring them to cover their datacenters with solar farms would lessen power requirements by 9% plus whatever offset to cooling costs, that's not nothing as we try to find ways to power these things beyond private natural gas plants, which they can't keep doing.

The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US's largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.

Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.

@Jaycifer solar farms are not exclusive with agricultural farms, though. Especially in areas with a high DLI (lots of sunlight most of the year) they are complimentary: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshpearce/2025/11/15/why-farmers-are-shielding-their-crops-with-solar-panels/

You're being sarcastic, right?

There are a few ways to store excess energy generated during the day. Usually batteries are the obvious answer.

One of the great things about batteries is that the metal used in them is recyclable and can be repurposed to make new batteries. So, at some point, we'll barely need to be mining the metals used in those.

Compare that to petroleum products which, if not for green energy, would always needs to be extracting more and more to be able to satisfy an increasing demand of energy.

Except the bailout at this point is more money than exists, you'd have to print so much money as to cause instant hyper inflation and cause an even worse economic crash that would take AI with it anyway.

Not if you organize and do something against it

Oh my sweet summer child…

I'm exhausted of all this. The data centers have been so pervasive that some communities have been thinking about rationing electricity to get around the requirements. That's... a dystopia future if Ive ever seen one.

well, they train their AI with pro fossil propaganda as you see in forums like this. in fact, AI searches forums like this and makes summaries to answer questions you might ask it.

The real Roko's Basilisk is that it's disappointed in you and thinks you wasted your life playing with computers.

AI data centers use complex calculations. Why bring up websites or VPS? these are data centers are no issue, their footprints are small and don't require much energy to work, unlike the AI data centers.

if you start excluding the 1000+ B param models ..
using smaller models, would initially ease hardware demand by 60% .
OFC you cant.. and probably shouldnt, ignore and disrespect SOTA flagship models

Well that’s one way to speed run environmental catastrophe.

One example would be the ai data centers Musk has that he illegally had gas generators installed at. The fine compared to not running them at all is small in comparison to keep them on. This is why it needs to be a percentage or increasing stack of cost not just a small fine every time.

You'd be correct. Recent estimates are that climate change caused issues will reduce global income by about 15% and cost $40 trillion annually by 2050.

They'd make more money by tackling climate change. It's in the math. But that math has to be done over multiple years not just next quarter as you said.

I remember back in the 90's and early 2000's they argued that the average person's consumption was solely to blame for climate change. (While ignoring the pollution caused by multimillion dollar companies).

I'd love to see any kind of sources on this. From what I can tell animal agriculture emits roughly 20–30× more CO2e than all data centers combined.

Animal agriculture: The FAO's most recent estimate puts livestock supply chains at roughly 6.2 Gt CO2e per year, about 12% of global greenhouse gas emissions Data centers (including AI): The IEA puts all data centers at about 0.5% of global CO2 emissions today (~180 Mt CO2), projected to reach 1–1.4% by 2030

I love you Lemmy math nerds. (Not sarcasm.)

Thank you.

Get rid of both like I said, it’s not like we’re fighting for one to have the right to ruin our world over the other.

And the meat industry is based on subsidies and infrastructure that goes back what, decades?

If there's anything that produces carbon that's "inevitable" and "never going away", the meat industry is a far better candidate than AI, but I only ever hear arguments about the latter from the AI boosters.

(Hopefully it goes without saying but this is not a defense of keeping meat around, which is not something that can be said when you hear an AI inevitabilist say their cliche)

The world has gone mad

Feels more like the fossil fuel industry would be quite happy with people pointing fingers at AI for the more fundamental problem they are causing.

Case in point: Alberta. As a landlocked province, they have been struggling to get oil and gas to markets, being limited by the pipelines other provinces or the US is willing to build. Now, the vast, vast majority of the planned ai datacentres in Canada are in Alberta, with insane sweetheart deals from government.

They found a way to get paid to burn gas within their borders and are going whole hog.

We aren't, though, not even close. And we've also been holding back over the years. Trump even paid a german company to abandon an already approved offshore windpark.

Even still, I beg people to stop falling for the same sensationalist trick that makes every conservative foam at the mouth about immigrants. PUT ABSOLUTE NUMBERS INTO RELATION TO SOMETHING!! What is the estimated 34 million in 2030 in percent? What is the impact of non-veganism in the same time? What percentages are we looking at?

Our outrage and effort should be in relation to the negative impact of each problem. Animal AG has a gigantic impact in every sensible metric, and it's far far far bigger than AI. Be honest, do you think even a fraction of the loudest complainers about AIs resource use are vegan?

Can we really believe people whose morality stops wherever they'd personally need to actually do more than bitch and moan?