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.
I doubt the data centers are generating much of any co2. Fossil fuel power plants are.
then why are data centers using these fossil fuel power plants?
why are they getting lower rates to use them than an individual taxpayer?
Because the city built fossil fuel plants instead of renewable?
Cities don’t build power plants generally esp not large scale fossil fuel type
Neither do data centers
That’s right and that’s why they should be charged premium for their vanity exercises instead of being subsidized by the taxpayers
What else would they use? Thats what’s available
Because they can build more capacity based on a long term contract with the utilities.