Sadly it’s tricky to separate the two.
Say if hypothethically we have a data center that is not connected to the grid, and is entirely running on solar power and battery storage.
If the grid still generates (part of) its electricity need using fossil fuels, those same solar panels and batteries could instead have been used to (further) decarbonize the grid.
While using solar power is good, increasing the overall unnecessary electricity consumption is still not great.
Guess I’ll be contacting my MEPs, and looking into which MEPs support and oppose this plan.
Though I am glad to see my country at least has stated it finds the proposal unacceptable.
Be sure to make regular backups of your data.
… and using RAID is not a backup.
Just wait till Musk learns about banking regulations.
He’s already complaining about the EU regulations on social media, but they nothing compared to what banks have to deal with.
That hasn’t stopped me from using other Google services like Gmail, Docs, or Drive either.
If I ever decide I want to opt out of Google’s ecosystem I’ll just serve them a GDPR data deletion request.
That’s what I did when I deleted my Twitter account as well.
It really boils down to a few reasons:
I have a YouTube Premium subscription
That is assuming that those data centers are necessary. If the data center is doing something that is not really needed then it is in effect wasting power that could have been used for other purposes. (e.g. using surplus power to make steel or aluminium for instance)
While I do think that AI-tools can be increadibly useful, the current hype surrounding it very much looks like a bubble akin to the DotCom bubble to me. Companies left and right are jumping on the AI bandwagon for the sake of using the buzzword “AI” in their marketing speech.
I don’t consider that kind of use of datacenters to be necessary.