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Comment by kolinko | Hacker News Reader

Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.

  Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.

It's like saying "our crypto mining energy is carbon neutral" but ignoring the fact that if the carbon neutral energy is going into crypto mining, it's not going into something more useful. If crypto mining buys all the carbon neutral energy sources, then those sources aren't being used by other industries.

We have limited carbon neutral energy production.

MS revised its climate goals thanks to AI

https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...

Carbon neutrality doesn’t refill a drained reservoir used to cool off these machines. Running your servers on wind power doesn’t make the millions of gallons they’re dumping into cooling systems any less gone.

The water cycle refills drained reservoirs - the "carbon cycle" is not one we want to be part of.

Also note that there's other cooling solutions than evaporative cooling, such as closed loop water cooling with chillers, cooling with sea water, using heat pumps to redirect the heat to district heating loops (making use of the heat!), just building in colder places requiring less cooling, etc.

Google stopped claiming "operational carbon neutrality" shortly after the release of chatgpt.

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