Hello! It’s nice going stargazing

Skyrocketed by how much? To also use that mit source,

In 2017, AI began to change everything. Data centers started getting built with energy-intensive hardware designed for AI, which led them to double their electricity consumption by 2023.The latest reports show that 4.4% of all the energy in the US now goes toward data centers.

They link to a report from last year, but based on that, that still rather small no? That just only in the U.S alone and not globally. I do agree the share by datacenters, and by extension LLMs, will use more electricity in the future, but like in the grand scheme of things, like it is still relatively small.

To add, I mainly quote Kaffe, because I mainly see lots of people elsewhere say how data centers are taking so much water, but then it fails to ignore things like Kaffe mentioned in that quote. Another thing I wanted to add, that I forgot to in my early reply, but why is it that LLM is getting the brunt of this, but wasteful water practices in farming don’t get mention like the growing of alfalfa in the southwest in the united states that leads to a lot of water waste as well?

as it stands, we are putting the global south underwater so that people who are surrounded by yes-men can have yes-robots too.

I’m not exactly sure how data centers, or rather LLM’s are doing that or being the sole contributor to that? Besides guessing that you mean the use of mines, along with introducing more mines, and the transportation needed to continue and make said data centers. Along with the green house emissions that result from said activities, and with generating electricity to power said data centers usually from dirty sources like in the united states. Yet like again, data centers shares in green house emissions, is little compared to more direct things like the u.s military being the largest polluter, or from other things like transportation contributing a large share of green house emissions.

I just feel like it just goes again back to the issues of capitalism that AI exists in that context of, like CriticalResist said, and AI not really unique in these regards to contributing to climate change?

I think it is helpful to put some things in perspective, like for electricity usage, data centers only take up 1-1.5% of global electricity usage. Like stated here https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and-data-transmission-networks

What is the role of data centres and data transmission networks in clean energy transitions?

Rapid improvements in energy efficiency have helped limit energy demand growth from data centres and data transmission networks, which each account for about 1-1.5% of global electricity use. Nevertheless, strong government and industry efforts on energy efficiency, renewables procurement and RD&D will be essential to curb energy demand and emissions growth over the next decade.

To also cite form that article, there also this mention to.

Data centres and data transmission networks are responsible for 1% of energy-related GHG emissions

So even for overall GHG, data center’s general account very little. Of course with this technology being used more, electricity usage will rise a bit more but it still likely will be small in the grand scheme of things. Another question how much of that is specifically AI in regards to data centers in general? One cited figure is 10-20% of data centers is designated to AI usage. Like here https://time.com/6987773/ai-data-centers-energy-usage-climate-change/

Porter says that while 10-20% of data center energy in the U.S. is currently consumed by AI, that percentage will likely “increase significantly” going forward.

So, a lot of data centers are just being used for lots of other things like cloud stuff for example, but the share by AI is growing a bit more however.

Besides that, to go to the water usage, that is a problem, especially when data centers, in general, are built in areas that can’t really sustain such things. However this is just data centers in general, and this was happening before AI in the last two years. I think it is also worth mentioning to that like, google and the rest are able to buy water rights to which also completely fucks over First Nations to which don’t get a say in these things.

To quote Kaffe, who I think is also on here to??

Instead of weaponizing climate anxiety to attack AI merely to defend property law and labor aristocracy, let’s cut to specific issues like Meta’s and Google’s ability to purchase water in violation of treaties.

https://xcancel.com/probablykaffe/status/1905480887594361070#m