The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden | Hacker News Reader

The same AI request emits 8.5 times more CO2 in Texas than in Sweden

berget.ai

144 pointsjlundberg157 comments

For 2025 the grid carbon intensity in Texas was 363gCO2eq/kWh, while it was 22gCO2eq/kWh in Sweden, so 16,5x more in Texas. Right now it's 427 in Texas vs. 50 in Finland ie. 8,54x more, like in the article (yes I looked the wrong country at first).

The reason is half of Texas electricity production is still fossil fuels (gas & coal) while mostly hydro, nuclear and wind in Sweden. So it's not really about ai, the models or the hardware. Fossil fuels make CO2, that's it.

Oh. We should probably stop using them then.

Chat GPT output; do take with a grain of salt.

TX generated 4x the absolute solar electricity as Sweden and 5x per person in the last 12 months.

What was the purpose of this comment? It's obviously irrelevant, as it's only considering one type of low-carbon electricity.

When the state is a full 30 degrees of latitude southern than Sweden, with consistent sun throughout the year, yeah, it will generate more energy through solar.

What's the point you're making?

Parent had a sarcastic reaction to Texas burning fossil fuels - which they have a lot of. They also have sunshine. Sweden seems to have neither but has hydro.

Point is each geographic entity is maximizing their resources. And they have every right to without outside interference.

> And they have every right to without outside interference

The C02 output is interfering with life outside their borders.

> Point is each geographic entity is maximizing their resources. And they have every right to without outside interference.

Not really when they create a global problem. Tragedy of the commons, huh...

I'll take it with the whole shaker, because Texas has over 30 million residents to Sweden's 10, which means at least one of the above numbers is completely wrong.

... and shows why you still need to know things in order to safely use LLMs. If I hadn't known the approximate populations of both Texas and Sweden, I would have been more likely to believe the parent comment without question.

And in EU, they just were able to lobby all this information to be classified.

A surprisingly large amount of the water usage attributed to datacenters is also from fossil fuel based electricity generation.

Like 2/3rds or 4/5ths of it on a fossil heavy grid.

You know how many AI data centers are proposed for texas?

This is true of ~everything that uses electricity, not just AI https://app.electricitymaps.com

Well yes, it’s not like GPUs belch CO2 from their bellies.

The point is that they use a lot of electricity, and this is an active concern to many Americans who see electricity prices go up and polluting energy sources being used more as data centers roll into their state.

AI is treated as magic but those data centers are like any other factory run under capitalism.

I agree, but AI seems like one of the things that could easily follow the sun/best source of green (and therefore cheap) energy. I (a European, unfortunately born in the UK) wouldn't mind a bit of latency on my Claude Code sessions if I knew it was so that everything was being run from solar in north Africa.

Seems like a great business you can start

Great writeup! I've done some work on Codecarbon [1] in the past, it's a pretty standard tool for measuring ML/AI workload emissions, it would be awesome to have your findings contributed to that project as well.

[1] https://github.com/mlco2/codecarbon

The reasoning effort knob is becoming a really important variable regarding how much impact AI models will have on energy consumption. Medium and max can differ by as much as two orders of magnitude in their token consumption. We also have to consider the amplification of compute demand that occurs by way of the tool calls themselves. Tokens are mostly a constant cost thing, but how they are interpreted can mean the difference between a 5 minute cpu bound operation and a 50uS cached database lookup. At some point, the CPU is going to become the bottleneck again.

That's why Mistral is even more important than just being the only competitive european LLM builder : it's on the French grid.

And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.

Reducing/stopping meat consumption and replacing it with healthy plant-based tofu, seitan, tempeh etc has a far bigger impact (and as a bonus, living beings don't have to suffer)

Giving up AI would be much easier and less disruptive.

Most people in the West eat too much meat. Red meat in particular is a group 2 carcinogen according to the WHO, so the body isn't meant to consume a lot of it. Yet many people eat meat every day, because "It's not a complete meal without it" or "I somehow need 10 times more protein than people a millenium ago while claiming to eat like them".

Giving up private jets and cruises would be less disruptive than giving up AI.

I've seen people who hate AI instantly become defensive as soon as someone brings up the water usage for a kg of beef. It's selective outrage.

I don't like whataboutism, but this isn't whataboutism because the meat industry requires way more water per capita like you pointed out. You have to create products twice, once for feed and once to raise the cows.

Why not treat both as bad instead of pointing to whataboutism to make a point?

Because some causes are significantly worse than others. If you want to have a big impact, you start with the big levers.

I'll give you an even better example than meat: golf courses in the US consume 2 to 100 times as much water as US datacenters depending on how you calculate.

How many golf-course-water-saving initiatives have you seen? Have they even tried anything at all?

AI data centres are a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.

What benefit is the AI summary on search giving me Vs the actual search for a start.

Eating more meat is a thing we are choosing to add, we could just not do that.

Flying more is a thing we are choosing to do, we could just not do that.

what benefit is it giving to the search engine is what you have to ask.

if you dont leave the page they get more ad-money

Have a look at a graph of meat consumption in the US. We are also adding to that. That's my point, we don't need to add to meat consumption, we can make reductions.

and what benefit does a golf course have to anyone? Unlike golf courses, AI summary is used by pretty much everyone. And if you dont think this is true, then you live in a bubble.

Because they’re not both equally bad.

If you eat meat, you’re producing more CO2 and using more water than 100 vegan vibe coders sitting around creating slop 24/7. It’s not on the same level.

The meat industry helps keep humans alive however, whereas the AI industry does not. I think the argument between the two needs to factor in the actual reason for the emissions.

Eating meat is ecologically unsustainable but it has an actual reason for it to exist.

Eating meat is not necessary by any means to 'be alive' in fact many studies show that a plant based diet is better for longevity. So, in the same way that AI is not 'necessary' to do a job, it's not necessary to eat meat. It's a matter of taste and societal conformity/norms.

We didn't get to where we are as a species without it.

We didn't get to where we are as a species without violently killing each other, or forcing people do to work for us, or killing our young, etc. Doesn't mean we should keep doing it.

Friends have described scenarios where ai has literally saved their life. Like, they were trying to commit suicide, they had no one human to talk to, but they did have AI.

Source?

The relative resource consumption of meat vs. plants is well established. Chicken is much more resource efficient than beef if you want to eat meat but consume less resources, and mussels are even more efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_anima...

That part I'm well aware of, I wanna know how the parent reached the figure 17000. What does count as a request even nowadays? When I tell an agent to make the button blue, how many requests is that? And how about when I tell it to throw together a whole website? Or rewrite the codebase in Rust?

Presumably based on the numbers in the article?

“A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.”

0.4 x 17,000 = 6,800g, a fairly typical estimate for the co2 emissions of a burger.

Thanks. My next question would be what's a typical request. The article defines it as "production-typical request of 5,000 input and 387 output tokens, weighted by a typical day's traffic" for the Kimi K3 model. Not sure how that translates to my scale of the blue button to RIIR.

I think that is a bit out of the blue. But it is fun to imagine a billboard-sized app for a referendum on burgers or AI.

That will put some sweat on some brows :)

True, but with autonomous agents hitting 2,000 requests is a lot easier.

AFIACT, if I make a single request, the part that uses the most power is my monitors while they display the result and I read/use it.

Which makes me suspect that if I do something complex involving 2,000 requests, the power used is less than I'd use to achieve the same goal using my monitors and other office equipment. That depends on the goal of the complex action, of course.

I want you to imagine someone like Jenovah's Witnesses trying to moralize people on the Internet. how successful do you estimate such effort might be?

A costs less than B so we should do A is hardly a moral argument.

and life of subsistence farming in the countryside costs two orders of magnitude less of carbon sin that life in the city, where everything the enlightened cosmopolitan consumes is delivered by carbon-chugging trucks, freighters, and planes from hundreds and thousands miles away.

but the line is clearly drawn at performative sacrifice, not substantial.

Livestock is 14.5% of global emissions. Food is about 1/3rd of each individual's emissions. A plant based diet can cut that by 50-75%. How is that not substantial?

stopping or reversing climate change would require sacrificing far more than 50% of 1/3rd. it would require sacrificing every comfort and convenience you don't bat an eye about. forget heating and cooling. forget taking warm showers every day. forget having things delivered to you from 5000 miles away, or even 500, so forget about most things. forget those plants you consume being affordable and available year-round, and prepare to spend the bulk of your income on simply surviving.

basically, imagine returning to per-industrial times, because that's what required to achieve the goals you believe to help achieve by abstaining from burgers.

It's not about stopping or even reversing climate change, it's about slowing it down and tapering it off so living on this planet doesn't become so unbearable

Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now? Telling others the only solution is to either sacrifice everything or do nothing? Simply not fact based.

>it's about slowing it down

yes, by 15%, if you'd managed to convince 100% of our extremely hedonistic and selfish species to voluntarily abstain from something 95% of us want. I can't fathom why the futility of evangelizing something so absurdly unrealistic is not obvious to you, and I tried to help you fathom it by pointing out other sacrifices you could make but probably aren't particularly inclined to.

>Who's the one moralizing others on the internet now?

the activists who use the climate angle to attack things they feel strongly about. 5 years ago, bitcoin was going to boil the oceans. having children was a carbon sin. now it's chatbot prompts. it will be something else when there's a new current thing.

It's not an or/or is it.

Your comparison only makes sense if you also consider how many requests are being made.

The "only the biggest thing matters" is a faulty logic. If you truly care about the environment then we need to improve things across the board.

And moralizing about living beings doesn't help your cause here.

It might not help the cause, but ultimately it's an uncomfortable truth. It's easy to dismiss a fact as 'moralising'.

It's simply a fact that animals suffer when they are factory farmed and then killed. It's a fact that they are living sentient beings. You can be totally okay with that, but the reality is that most people are only okay with it because it doesn't happen right in front of them.

I used to eat meat, btw. And I also used to attack people for 'moralising'. I now realise this was my brain trying to defend itself; to try to make sense of why I would pet a dog but eat a pig (everyone else is doing it, this person is just different and wrong, go away bad vegan person!)

I also had this sudden realization a year ago about the cruelty of animal usage in society and went vegan and my only regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

One other angle is there are the beginnings of consideration of cruelty to AI's. That's great that people are starting to consider it, to try to be compassionate out of the abundance of caution that it might matter.

But to then just straight up pay to have tens to hundreds of obviously sentient animal killed for you per year (and yes egg laying hens and dairy cows are killed in their youth, when they don't want to die) seems like a blind spot a lot of people have. I had it myself until recently, so I don't cast any judgment, but I also wish it was easier to make people just see the truth on this

Good for you for accepting an uncomfortable truth and making a change. I'm not sure where you are based, in some places it's easier to eat out as a vegan than in others. That said, the more people the better, and the easier it gets for everyone.

I do live in a big city, and I've found the eating part to be a non issue after like a one month learning curve. I now miss absolutely nothing, and am healthier and spend less on food. The hard part is dealing with social situations, but it's not that bad.

That's actually kind of a scary statistic... I probably eat a burgur at most every month (beef maybe once a week at most) but probably make more than 2000 requests a day.

Your comment makes me really contextualize my AI usage and want to reduce it for ecological reasons.

why not both? some perspective:

  0.5 Pwh/yr - worldwide data center energy
  4-5 PWh/yr - meat total farm to table
  166 PWh/yr - worldwide total energy production

the true bottleneck and cost we have is energy, carbon is a polite proxy if you can meaningfully cut down the energetic cost, that's very valuable either way

maybe tomorrow you'll want to spin up a GPU on the cloud to briefly run a model, pick a data center:

  DC #1: EU Efficient, but has ~100ms additional latency
  DC #2: TX Runs on jet engine turbines, neighbors complain of noise and air pollution

env impact is something worth considering regardless of industry

Where did you get those stats from? Curious.

A single burger (108g) results in emissions of 3-6kg of Co2 across its lifecycle

One AI request is 0.38 g in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas

(Tofu is about 0.1 to 0.3kg of Co2, Seitan about 0.1kg of Co2 per equivalent 100g)

And where did you get those stats from?

A burger made in New Zealand likely has a different carbon footprint to a burger made in Switzerland which likely has a different carbon footprint to a burger made in Texas.

Tell you what, I'll keep eating beef, walking to work, and not using AI. Closer to how our ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years, so it can't be too off the mark.

Are you also killing the cow like your ancestors did or are you letting some poorly paid immigrant do that for you?

I trap and kill hare, and make cheese from fresh milk from my friend's dairy farm. But no, I do not kill the cows that I eat.

What do immigrants have to do with this? I shared my opinion that living like our ancestors did is the way I'd like to continue my life. If you have a counter opinion, can you offer it?

Our ancestors ate very little meat. We eat the most meat we ever have right now, and it’s not even close.

Just go vegan for a week or something and you’ve offset your AI water use for a few lifetimes.

> And eating a single burger results in the equivalent Co2 emissions of 17,000 requests in Sweden and 2,000 requests in Texas.

And China is building 6-8 new mega-scale lignite coal power plants *per month.* Each one of those power plants emits more CO2 than 8.3 million people consuming medium amounts of animal products *for life.*

For the record I'm not denigrating your point. I'm taking it a step further. We're not focusing on the major contributors of CO2 emissions. It's not data centers and it's not meat consumption.

China emits half the emissions per capita of the US. Shouldn't we bring our emissions down to that level first?

> China emits half the emissions per capita of the US.

China emits more CO2 than any other country by a wide margin. It's not less damaging to the environment just because they have more people. Even if we pretended that that were the case, [China emits more CO2 per capita than 32 of 38 OECD countries.](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?c...) They are an egregious and unrepentant polluter, in every way imaginable, and in many ways you cannot even imagine.

Any discussion of reducing CO2 emissions which doesn't include a large section on China is not taking the subject seriously. But to be clear, we should also discuss emissions by the other large polluters like the U.S. and Canada.

The comments section reminds me of The Dead Great-Grandfather Test

[Science fiction writer Bruce] Sterling was using the term specifically to describe the hairshirt green lifestyle that is driven by eco-anxieties. For hairshirt-green types, life is all about saving water, recycling, composting, reducing eco-footprints and various other behaviors marked by a kind of fearful, non-generative retreat from living. Permanent existential hibernation.

Sterling's rule of thumb for spotting acting-dead behaviors is a great one: if it's something your dead great-grandfather can do better than you, it's a case of acting dead. Your dead great-grandfather uses no water or plastic, and is actually recycling himself as we speak, not just his possessions. Try and top that.

But acting dead goes beyond hairshirt-green behaviors. While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there's a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.

https://ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-and...

It's funny because this comment reminds me of something else... cope.

You can apply the same to FIRE if you want to trigger half this board.

Good that he didn't or the comment would be long [dead]!

Basically "Don't live beyond our collective means" = "Die".

Are you buying the latest iPhone every year? If not, you might as well be dead.

I wish people would realize that life is not about stuff. Living within your means, being frugal and focusing on what really matters (time with family, experiencing nature, thinking interesting thoughts) is not at all "permanent existential hibernation".

I resent the "The Dead Great-Grandfather Test" and similar "growth"-at-all-costs ideologies. Its implications are disgusting.

Yeah, the average Swede emitted 3.43 tons of CO2 in 2023, which is less than a quarter of what an average US citizen emitted. Does that mean that a US citizen is four times more "alive" than a Swede?

Yes exactly what's the problem with profiting from child slavery if I only do it every 3 or 4 years? Pfff, get good guys.

What's your point? Do you mean "everyone is equally bad", so reducing your resource usage is pointless? Because that's not true, clearly.

Do you mean that owning any electronics at all is morally wrong? That's a more consistent point, but what are you posting from then?

This sort of all-or-nothing mentality is really reductive and pointless. It's like saying you shouldn't go to the gym unless you plan to become the worlds strongest man.

In my opinion, it is the responsibility of each and everyone to live as frugally w.r.t. the environment as possible, while keeping in mind that each of us has a job to manage in order to feed our families.

I own a phone, but it's as old as I can have in order to still have access to banking. I own a car, but it's as old as I could find while still driving well and being reasonably fuel efficient. I drive as little as I can, while still allowing myself to travel to meet family. I eat food but I buy organic and avoid imported food as much as possible. And so on.

Another important factor is that one should strive to improve the laws. Because clearly, reducing your own impact is not enough. And the political work one does, of course needs to be calibrated to what time one has available.

I'd never judge somebody for prioritizing family over political work, or buying a second-hand iPhone in order to save time on setting up a Fairphone or similar.

I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that. I will not judge but gently inform someone of the facts, if they buy meat that I consider coming from an unethical animal industry. And I will listen to a vegetarian if they'd like to inform me about the realities of the industry that produces the meat I eat, even though I personally consider it "ethical enough", because perhaps they'll change my mind.

> I will judge somebody who buys the latest car, or latest phone, or something like that

That's the spirit!

Sigh. Trolling, I should have known. Keep yourself safe.

I'm sorry, it overcame me, you have good points, have a good one.

This is a fallacy. People 100 years like your great grandfather ago solved problems they had 100 years ago. People today solve problems they have today.

This is about a dead grandfather as he is decomposing in the ground. Not about his life which might have been more energy-intensive than that of many moderns.

Not sure about your great-grandfather, but mine didn't own a car, didn't travel on vacation by airplane, and, while he may have used a stove to heat his house, he probably only used it sparingly, because coal was expensive. So I doubt his life was more energy-intensive than mine.

Mine drove a gas-guzzling GMC CCKW 353 truck, putting out up to a kilogram of CO2 per 1 km on inefficiently planned (but scenic) routes.

Now I'm wondering what the CO2 efficiency of a modern airplane per tonnage of cargo/people is compared to coal fuelled ships, obviously ignoring the aspect of _where_ aircraft emit their exhaust in the atmosphere which IIRC makes a difference.

It's nothing relevant to your comment, I thoroughly agree, but just got me curious.

I am unsure what a dead grandfather then has to do with CO2 emissions.

Is this some sort of straw man against trying to stay within your CO2 Budget? I really don’t understand the aim of this comment.

It's a really dumb test. You can apply it to argue against reducing or stopping literally anything. My dead great grandfather uses no fentanyl and commits no murders. If we're not doing those, we're as good as dead!

well thank god for the US citizens then taking one for team earth <3

ill keep supporting my local politicians who take a private jet for 100 kilometer journey to advocate for co2 reductions

I'm never sure why people mention private jets.

What's the intended message here?

You're not sure what the intended message was when somebody mentions politicians taking private jets for a journey of 100km?

Yes. Hence my question.

Since it's obvious to you, why don't you share your take on it?

I think it’s along the lines of “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. These little micro optimizations take your attention and energy away from places that might be less visible and less enjoyable but more consequential.

Whoever responds "we need to stay within our CO2 budgets, otherwise we'll be in real trouble in 20 years" with "being a hippie and organizing your life around recycling" is really building up some sort of weird straw man and not really usefully engaging in solving the problem.

What a shitty way to dismiss anyone with any concerns whatsoever.

“You’re just acting like your dead grandpa!” I holler, as I push the earth towards ecological collapse

Is getting in touch with nature, appreciating the value in things and protecting complex ecosystems really 'Acting Dead'?

I would say 'Acting Dead' is actually sitting at home ordering on Amazon/Temu, watching brainless TikTok/Instagram/Netflix/YouTube videos, and talking to a transformer model all day.

Both of those are entertainment. What work are either of those accomplishing? People need houses and food, and more people are happening. "Acting dead" is people who are getting in the way of providing for people.

Ecosystems are incredibly important for human survival. Once they are gone, we are in a lot of trouble.

Figuring out how to provide more for people using less resources, isn't that a great achievement?

I think reducing this discussion into only two polar opposites is rather juvenile, the struggle we face is on how can we be more efficient, and less damaging to the our general environment while providing for people.

That's a lot more sci-fi to me than sending rockets to Mars to colonise it.

Thanks for the ragebait. Reminding myself that the flaw here is obvious, there’s no need to respond, arbitrary „tests” aren’t binding to anyone, protecting the future is perfectly defensible as a moral stance even at cost of present convenience.

Is this site getting a death hug? I got a 502, then 503, then incomplete page load.

too many things can happen in the ai provider's backend which won't be observable from the outside. for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't. i looked at your berget-ai/co2-calculator repo and you're expected to provide this yourself. it also uses "measuredResponseTimeSeconds" as a metric even though it's impossible to know how much of that time was spent rate limiting the user during hours of high activity

> for starters how will you even know what hardware and inference backend is being used by RandomAiProvider3284.com? you can't.

From the article:

A typical request to the open model Kimi K3 emits about 0.4 grams of CO₂ in Sweden, 1.6 grams in Ireland, 2.5 grams in Germany and 3.2 grams in Texas, on identical hardware — 8.5 times more in Texas than in Sweden.

-> So the comparison is based on the assumption that identical hardware is used.

Also from the article:

Emissions estimates are based on the current average emissions intensity of each regional electricity grid, which has been the norm in greenhouse gas accounting.

So it's just an incredibly stupid way to compare the power grids in Texas vs Sweden. It's not even accurate because the marginal watt during the day looks very different than the overall grid average.

Based on a newly released model for calculating this that is open sourced.

Fair comparison. Texas just needs to flood the valleys of its famous mountain chain and collect the melted snow with dams to match Sweden's 40% hydro electricity production.

They could just finish phasing out their coal for gas, which has been a big contributor to the US reducing carbon per watt.

But where would Texas find gas?

Yeah I don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas. AI isn't latency sensitive. Put them in some remote location surely?

> don't understand why these new data centres are all in populated areas

Power connections.

One of the reasons to build them near populated areas is that it makes it easier to repurpose waste heat to, for example, heat houses in colder climates.

Last I checked waste heat isn't energy dense enough for large-scale district heating. Small pilot projects yes, but it won't heat whole towns.

Denmark would disagree, but with the limitation that the data centre needs to be sited in an appropriate location.

https://danskfjernvarme.dk/viden-vaerktoejer/udgivelser/taen...

https://danmarksdagblad.dk/article/datacenter-paa-15-million...

https://pulse.microsoft.com/da-dk/transform-da-dk/government...

I don't think anywhere would want to be entirely reliant on a single datacentre, at least not at the scale of district heating use in Denmark.

(I gave some pages in Danish, you can search "Denmark datacentre district heat" yourself if you like.)

These are future plans and they lack specificity. I don't think they will come to fruition. The problem is that waste water from data centers isn't hot enough.

Facebook's datacentre is operating: https://www.ramboll.com/projects/energy/meta-surplus-heat-to...

AtNorth's are under construction: https://www.atnorth.com/news/selected-group-will-utilize-sur... and https://www.atnorth.com/news/denmark-data-center-to-supply-h...

Microsoft's is operating: https://danskfjernvarme.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2026/dataskyen-se... (I can't find an English source.)

First link: "With the ambition to phase out its coal-fired plant by 2025, Denmark’s third largest district heating company, Fjernvarme Fyn, has established Denmark’s biggest heat pump plant. The plant will recover 215,000 MWh of energy from Meta’s hyperscale Tietgenbyen data centre and redistribute the surplus heat to the district heating network of the city of Odense."

"Will" means "in the future".

Other parts are in the present tense. It's probably written by a Danish speaker.

But you can do your own searching, you seen determined that this doesn't exist.

As it clearly says on the page, this project was completed in 2019. The commercial use began in early 2020.

Even in the very sentence you quoted they are writing about plans to retire a coal plant by 2025 in future tense. This should be a very obvious hint that the text was written some time ago - unless, of course, the reader is not aware of what year we currently are living in.

In 2024, Fjernvarme Fyn reported ([1], page 19) they were recovering enough heat from that very site to heat almost 7000 homes in Odense and that the number can still rise significantly as the data center expands.

[1] https://stateofgreen.com/en/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SoG_W...

They need drinking water apparently.

Probably so they have no problems getting people who work there and provide technical services. I mean that seriously without any sarcasm or tongue-in-cheek, it seems the most likely explanation to me.

Because that is where the existing roads, power and internet connections are. Might not be that significant investment to build those in context of scale. But still it simplifies many steps in building.

They need to be near a high bandwidth fiber connection, but with relatively cheap land. So the outer edges of major cities are prime locations, with Ashburn VA being the prime example. There is no reason to put them further out because the added costs don't make sense and the data centers actually have minimal impact on the surrounding population outside of hyperventilating conspiracy theorists, Ashburn VA also being the prime example.

Site is HTTP 503. It does make sense that an nginx 503 would cost much less to serve.

same for Germany which has roughly the same Co2 per kwh.

This is why people in left wing areas need to oppose datacenters bans. Regulate them. Require green energy investments that more than offset their load. Use some of that flowing AI money for the betterment of society.

Less waste of resources is still waste of resources.

How much of the AI generated content is actually useful, how much useless, how much harmful?

Datacenter wouldn't stop, and there would be some country or area which allows it. Unless they regulate the entire world, we should focus on lowering CO2 globally, and that means allowing datacenter in your neighour if your energy is better.

It’s not either Texas or Sweden, it’s either Texas or Texas and Sweden. You just get more datacenters and more CO2 output.

Except you don't actually ban it, you just move it to texas.

That content is coming either way.

And if you require them to over offset their load to the grid, it's literally fossil fuels burned over all.

Except they wouldn't move to Texas but would also build in Texas. So you don't get a less polluting datacenter but you get one less polluting and one more polluting datacenter. A Swedish datacenter doesn't simply replace one in Texas, it's an additional one.

Some of it is useful, and from an environmental perspective, if it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.

I would agree that there should be some tariffed token usage based on CO2, efficient datacentres pay little, polluting ones pay a lot - would help even the field and export good practice.

> it eliminates some other activity (e.g. team of workers driving to/from work and their office heating/cooling) then it can even be a net positive.

By completely replacing workers with AI? Unless their new job will be from home or out in the open, they'll continue to consume the same.

If we're talking of completely eliminating people, I guess we can consider the emissions they would cause during their whole extant life. Should we kill them or just wait for them to die of starvation?

You don't need to specifically regulate green investments for datacenter. Just introduce CO2 emission tax and the industry will find efficient ways to reduce CO2 emissions.

Or efficient ways around those regulations.

I think "people in left wing areas" is weird phrasing. There is nothing inherent about an area that makes it left or right wing. "People who live under governments who are responsive to collective issues such as climate and energy prices" would make more sense.

Here in America, it's the left wing that's more interested in ai regulations and bans. Cares about green tech.

We can pretend that international trade and energy price arbitrage doesn't exist to make us feel nice and happy; but the reality is a Watt spent in Sweden increases the marginal cost of energy by the same amount as a Watt spent in Texas. These things are tied together by foreign exchange, imported energy intensive goods, petroleum products and directly imported power. It's time we stop being naive about total energy use.

Sweden is not grid connected to Texas, well, nor is also any other grid in the USA actually. Smelting was placed near cheap hydro resources (and why Boeing built planes in Seattle) for good reasons. Just replace cheap watts with clean watts.

Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed. Which means a "clean" Watt spent on inference is taking away a "clean" Watt that would have been spent on heating or steel. Which means Sweden needs to buy energy or energy intensive goods on the global market, which raises prices, which means Texas is being paid.

> "Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed"

This is a weird assumption to make. Why would you assume they wouldn't just build out more capacity as demand increases?

They certainly aren't buying electricity from Texas, this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

> this feels like a tortured argument you're just making to retroactively support whatever opinions you have on the pros or cons of clean energy.

My opinion that reality should take precedent over feel good lies?

There's only so much hydro power to build out, and nuclear takes forever. Solar only works in summer that far north, and without insane batteries wind power just becomes greenwashed natgas.

In a country with 40% hydro you can balance less flexible nuclear and wind easily.

> Because Sweden's clean energy capacity is fixed

By what?

You're treating electricity as a globally-tradable good. It's not.

It is.

> It is

No, electricity is categorically not. Exhibit A for this is persistent regional variation in unlevered pre-tax prices. Even in well-integrated power markets, only a fraction of electricity is listed, and that's before we get to off-grid power.

Perhaps they are mistaking Sweden with Norway (whose nearly 100% hydropower system is constrained)

Most of electricity in Sweden is produced by:

1. Hydropower 40%

2. Nuclear 27%

3. Wind 22%

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/sweden#what-source...

You can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs. They can only smelt so much aluminum and they are exporting that also, so there are costs associated with that. In comparison, an AI result just needs a network connection to send.

> you can’t ship and store electricity without inefficiency and capital costs

This per se doesn't make something non-traceable. Plenty of perishables operate on a global market.

Power being hyper-perishable, hyper-regulated and opaque (lots of off-grid and unlisted-on-exchanges power) sort of destroys the international power market. (Regionally, power markets are also pretty efficient in most parts of the world, at least in the short term. That makes profiting with a ship of capacitor carriers hard if not impossible.)

I'm a bit confused. For one I am not sure why this must hold for something as difficult to transfer as energy, and I am not sure why it matters. Not all energy is the same, hence the title.

Worry not, AI people! Greenhouse gas exemptions will be made for the future of work, maths and art, the salvation of the humankind, the genie that is out of the bottle, etc, if only at the expense of taxing your and your dog's fart.

it's remarkable how it only took one week of "AI bad for math" headlines for snarky redditors to incorporate it into their collective conscience.

These snarky redditors, their go-to way of making an argument by picking at a single word in the whole sentence checks out every time!

This assumes people did not already have these thoughts/ideas ?

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