Wow, so much energy spent to get worse search results compared to 10 years ago.
And I’ll bet roughly 50->90% of that usage is idiots doing crypto/ai garbage.
No lol the amount of power that cloud services use is atrocious. The serverless trend makes things add up. It’s cheaper in terms of hardware but oh boy do all those layers of abstraction make things heavy, especially loading of the applet, communication to other applets. (I’m forgetting if applets is the correct name).
I actually don’t belive the ~5% figure at all—especially with the track record of honesty (or the lack of it) these companies have.
Sure, datacenters are rather efficent, but times 330 million people in the US adds up.
I would bet that hardware being way more efficient and corporate IT infrastructure being consolidated in data centers is much more energy efficient than the alternative. The fact that we are running much more layered and compute-intensive systems doesn’t really change that.
I have a solution: spin up a dozen nuclear power plants to fuel AI to solve the problem. If there’s not enough nuclear, just burn coal.
Just spin up a dozen nuclear plants, huh? So who’s going to build that, how long is the construction time and who is going to fund that, given that new nuclear is the most expensive power there is?
More questions for AI to answer.
A gen AI in charge of nuclear engineering and just put in charge of the world in general. What a wonderful idea! You people sure deserve what you’ll get.
