In related current news:<p><i>Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity</i> <a href="https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacenters-now-guzzle-23-of-the-countrys-electricity/5270013" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacen...</a><p><pre><code> The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption.
Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.
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Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.
But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.<p>So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.<p>This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered <i>cleanly</i> and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.<p>If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).<p>Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.
Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.
> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere<p>This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already <i>have</i> some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.<p>BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.
We don't really need the French on the other hand, how could we live without AI?
Yeah, we are not talking about ecological impact of France enough
<i>Yann Le Cun enters the chat...</i>
Related:<p><i>Microsoft latest report shows 25% emissions raised due to AI data centers</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870229">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870229</a>
Man, we are cooked, literally
The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.
No, wait! The increased productivity will lead to a decoupling of the economy from resources consumption and GHGs emission. Just one more data center.<p>/s
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Pretty small if you consider the value they provide, honestly.<p>And they'll ride the transition to green energy for "free".