There was a blast of anti-datacenter either propgoanda or just incredibly bad science, a bit before the AI craze, where they took the total amount of internet traffic, the total amount of data center energy usage, then said, well, netflix is x% of bandwidth so it must be x% of energy usage too. https://www.weforum.org/stories/industries-in-depth/carbon-f...

In the spirit of radical misunderstanding I assume this ridiculous proposition is continuing to be foisted upon people. A "Badhearts Law" (riffing Goodheart's "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure") if you will: finding a bad measure to make bad accusations.

(The idea that AI is going to pay a heavy tax or even medium tax for this seems like some super wishful thinking.)

because old people don't understand it and don't care, they just want more money for themselves