alt Hacker NewsIt’s new capacity!
They’re not even saying they shouldn’t do it or that they’re not useful or not worth it but you Cannot logically say both “these things do not use a lot of power” and “we need to build more power plants to handle these things”
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It isn't all new capacity. The popular discourse hardly ever mentions it but AI is a small fraction of why we need new datacenters and the bulk of the demand is driven by general IT needs, particularly consolidation of small, grossly wasteful corporate data racks into vastly more efficient cloud services.
Edited to answer: The question has also been addressed by the same author as the article: USA spent a quarter century not building generators and that negligence has finally caught up to us, despite objectively heroic efficiency efforts on the part of the IT sector.
Yeah you can, though to be fair its referred to as jevons paradox because it is counterintuitive.