A runaway datacenter power grab is great news for net zero

On the one hand, yeah sure if it helps, on the other hand, yes, let's continue the vertical integration of literally everything! Let's have Big Tech get into power generation and acquire Big Oil!

I wonder if by 2100 only one megacorp remains, will there still be people chanting "having a large market share is not a crime" and as long as theoretically someone could acquire a single digit market share on your market, it's not a monopoly", as we descend into fascism.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Globally, datacenter infrastructure is expected to more than double over the same period, going from two to four percent of all electrical demand and adding the equivalent of a brand new medium-sized European nation.

These may seem poor reasons to lumber the environment when we're supposed to be lightening the load, but it also highlights one of long-term facts of life for the big IT shed builders.

We can't rip out all the roads and railways and rebuild them to match the needs of the 21st century: we're having enough trouble with replacing internal combustion with electric motors.

Seventy years on, this technology is being looked at as a civil power source, but is struggling to free itself from the stagnating legacy of earlier, far more massive nuclear programmes.

So imagine if the world's datacenter industry got together – yes, a fantasy, but these are needful items - and issued a specification for a standard, modular, small nuclear power plant.

It's the kind of low-risk, low-cost, environmentally positive move that governments can get behind without massive commitment of public funds, and made part of a (whisper it) industrial strategy that includes easing fiber provisioning and simple licensing.

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