> Your argument is the same as those who argue "our country shouldn't care about emissions when China is the biggest emitter".
China and the US are in the same order of magnitude in emissions. So NO that's absolutely not the argument I am making.
> Any energy use that's measurable in whole percentage points of global emissions needs addressing
But it isn't! That's my point. Electricity use is about 20% of total energy use. So if we talk about global emissions, data center is only about 20% * 2% = 0.4% of total energy use.
And then if we talk about total emittance, it's even lower because 40% of electricity is generated from nuclear and renewables.
> just look at how much time it's taken for EV penetration to be in any way significant
Yes so let's focus on that instead of data centers. Data centers are not the problem!
EDIT: Also CPUs and GPUs are still becoming more energy efficient. So I'm a bit skeptical of extrapolations which say that data centers will consume a large percentage of US energy. If the number of CPUs and GPUs doubles each 2 years, but energy efficiency doubles too, then overall energy usage doesn't grow so fast. Especially if old CPUs and GPUs are taken out of the system over time because they become too expensive to operate.
