Exactly this. Powering all AI data centers with renewable energy is actually trivially easy.
You could even legislate it and make big tech companies responsible for providing the power themselves. One stroke of the pen resolves the issue.
If OpenAI can afford to “spend $1 trillion” on AI they can afford to build some wind/solar/battery power plants.
Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
Can Microsoft and Google not afford to build a battery factory or nuclear power plant? Are they broke or something?
Why is the solution to scarcity of supply to bend over backwards and roll back regulations? The scarcity of supply itself should be a hint to society to stop supporting unfettered growth. Or maybe these mega-corporations need to get over it and pay fair market value for the projects they want to build.
Why do we have to breathe coal power emissions so that we can have one more ChatGPT wrapper nobody asked for?
Just to be pedantic: The median construction time is 7 years. With very slow planning, it is a decade, not decades. It can be done faster though.
Our power consumption won't be going down, and it generally wouldn't be the AI company itself running the project but the electricity companies that earn money supplying power that see dollar signs in all that extra electricity consumption.
Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless.
Not if your government refuses to let you build any renewable capacity.
"At BigGridCo we're proud to switch AI to 100% renewable power. On paper we just send all the dirty power to (scoffs) pesky houses and industry, leaving the clean power for AI."