That's not a defense.

If imaginary cloud provider "ZFQ" uses 10MW of electricity on a grid and pays for it to magically come from green generation, that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

There is no free lunch here; "we buy our electricity from green sources" is greenwashing bullshit.

Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads. By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

The US, for example, has about 5GW of solar manufacturing capacity per year. NVIDIA sold half a million H100 chips in one quarter, each of which uses ~350W, which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power. That does not include power conversion losses, distribution, cooling, and the power usage of the host systems, storage, networking, etc.

And that doesn't even get into the water usage and carbon impact of manufacturing those chips; the IC industry uses a massive amount of water and generates a substantial amount of toxic waste.

It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands over how much rare earth metals a Prius has and shipping it to the US from Japan, but ask about the environmental impacts of AI and it's all "pshhtt, whatever".

> that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

No. Renewable energy capacity is often built out specifically for datacenters.

> Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads.

No. This capacity would never never have been built out to begin with if it was not for the data center.

> By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

No. Renewable energy gets cheaper with scale, not more expensive.

> which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power.

There are contracts for renewal capacity to be built out or well into the gigawatts. Furthermore, solar is not the only source of renewable energy. Finally, nuclear energy is also often used.

> the IC industry uses a massive amount of water

A figurative drop in the bucket.

> It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands

HN is not a monolith.

> No. Renewable energy capacity is often built out specifically for datacenters

Not fully accurate. Indeed there is renewable energy that is produced exclusively for the datacenter. But it is challenging to rely only on renewable energy (because it is intermittent and electricity is hard to store at scale so often you need to consume electricity when produced). So what happens in practice is that the electricity that does not come from dedicated renewable capacity is coming from the grid/network. What companies do is that they invest in renewable capacity in the network so that "the non renewable energy that they consume at time t (because not enough renewable energy available at that moment) is offsetted by someone else consuming renewable energy later". What I am saying here is not pure speculation, look at the link to meta website, they are saying themselves that this is what they are doing

Not the OP.

I agree with a majority of points you made. Exception is to this

> A figurative drop in the bucket.

Fresh water sources are limited. Fabs water demands and pollution are high impact.

Calling a drop in the bucket comes in the weasel words category.

We still need fabs, because we need chips. Harm will be done here. However, that is a cost we, as a society, will choose to pay.

Who is going to decide what are a worthy uses of our precious green energy sources?

An efficient market where externalities are priced in.

We do not have that. The cost of energy is mis-priced, although we are limping our way to fixing that.

Paying the likely fair cost for our goods, will probably kill a lot of current industries - while others which are currently viable, will become viable.

You are dodging the question down another layer.

Who gets decide what the real impact price of energy is? That is not easily defined and well debated.

It’s very easily debated, Humanity puts it to a vote every day - people make choices based on the prices of goods regularly. They throw out governments when the price of fuel goes up.

Markets are our super computers. Human behavior is the empirical evidence of the choices people will make Given specific incentives.

This 10x!!!