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by jbroman 2077 days ago
The alternatives would seem to be "data center powered by non-renewable energy" and "no data center", no?
2 comments

Sadly, the question is "are they part of my tribe or not?"

I see it over and over again in my city in coastal California. Car dealership, gas stations? A-OK, they help me out. Instead let's go do a climate protest of a bank, an Amazon office, and a software as a service company, since they have Big Oil as clients. And let's conveniently forget the massive oil and car infrastructure from our city design, which creates huge amounts of demand for emissions. As long as the enemy is one- or two-degrees away in terms of connection, it's a target to be attacked.

Or perhaps a bunch of less efficient small data centers.
How would that help? Reducing the number of data centers doesn’t reduce the demand for them.
Efficiency of scale is very real for datacenters
Whoops I wrote this backwards. I meant to write reducing the size of datacenters.

The proposal I replied to would probably increase data center energy usage on balance.

A lot of technologies only work “at scale”. Some things can be scaled down, but I don’t think that’s trivial.