Paris MarxMar 16, 2024

“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/

#tech #cloud #ai #datacenter #environment

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.

The MIT Press Reader
Show threadLudovic Archivist LagouardetteMar 16, 2024

@parismarx

And sadly it doesn't need to be that way. The DC4 data center in Geneva is planned to heat hundreds of homes and in summer provide hot water to those same homes. This did require efforts to reuse the produced heat into other systems, but it can be done

Show threadthemadhatter
@Archivist @parismarx true. There are players who do these things differently, such as @ungleich @collective_zero #windcloud
Mar 17, 2024 at 11:20amIceCubesApp