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We need global emission cap & trade.

All the eco indicators had gone exponential before this shit even started. and the result will just be a more oppressed population with all the margins going to the owners. none of their wet dreams will be realized, just your oppression. The ecosphere is toast.

What you seem to miss here, is that a lot of organizations are moving their datacenters from on-prem to google/aws/ms. So yes, they consume more, but there are also others that consume less.

Their core product is our eyeballs, sold to advertisers. But I agree about search. And I suppose our eyeballs do tend to degrade over time, as well…

They consciously shitified it to get more advertising hits.

Enshittification. If you own 90% of the market, you cannot get more people to search. But you /can/ make search results worse so people will make more searches to reach the answer they want. This is what Google has been doing for a while now to get more revenue.

Curious, in the context of this dataset, to hear what you think of these sustainability rankings: time.com/article/2026...

The gains in efficiency from shrinking silicon have really slowed down for awhile now, and what tech companies are doing instead is just pushing more energy through the chips to get that extra performance, this is part of why energy usage continue to explode, real efficiency has long been abandoned.

Extremely dangerous

Also, Apple just works better. Not good enough, but still better.

all without getting near to making a profit or doing anything more productive than a good search engine or some mundane fake pics.

We are destroying earth right now, in real time. This is not the distant future we are talking about. Children born today will live & die in a burned-out world because of this.

Can you do some reporting how frequently all hardware inside these behemoth data centers is being replaced? AFAIK high performance computing hardware doesn't last long. A couple years and it's out.

ecfr.eu/article/why-...

“There will be no problem in taking all the electricity and water for data centres once we kill all the humans with catastrophic climate change oh wait oops no customers or revenue oops”

All of that for Gemini’s horseshit search results to be ignored.

Or Brave

I guess Techbros weren't foreseen by the US founding fathers...

even if you don’t change the settings, it only applies AI to certain searches, not all of them, and I do appreciate that it’s a lot easier to limit it further compared to other browsers.

Yeah - the charts above are direct electricity consumption only - I *wish* these companies disclosed a lot more detail about scope 3 electricity use. Apple in particular are a little sneaky with their supply chain renewable claims, but haven't had time to write about it much

Will Apple's future usage of Gemini hide their energy usage and shift it to Google as such, or will they report it in their own usage I wonder.

🌲 GOOGLE analysis ⤵️

‘Don’t be evil’

This is a nice general discussion of issues and potential areas of collaboration vs competition. [On with Kara Swisher] “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton Rings the Warning Bells podcastaddict.com/on-with-kara... via @PodcastAddict

These energy gobbling tech-monsters MUST be stopped before they fry the earth.

This is what the world is building instead of houses So that they can fuck everybody's jobs It's not like the world is lacking people And once your job is done "kill all the homeless" remember

"But if we don't beat up Mother Nature, go through her pockets for cash and other valuables, and dump her unconscious body in a random alley, our competitors might, and this could hurt our profits! OUR PROFITS!! PROFITS ARE AT STAKE!!!"

They don’t care because they will be dead before they burn…….. but they will make a ton of money before that happens🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

Some of the power used by New Zealand and other countries might even be used to run data centers.

You can see why Google dropped ‘don’t do evil’

I‘ve been thinking about this for too long. Any problems with Proton?

Same here, but I went to Infomaniak instead of Proton. Switching to /e/os too. Step by step, we can opt out of these greedy corps.

Many thanks

All so Google Search Bar can generate wrong answers 67% of the time

Run it, Sergei! Not complete data sets there as well as AWS is a huge pool party for commercial traffic. Last reported early 20's

@ketanjoshi.co From Image 2 the YoY growth rate is (linearly) increasing for all of these companies except Apple, so they’re even growing superexponentially.

@doctorow.pluralistic.net says the bursting of the AI bubble will be terrible, and I think it will be bad for the economy but statistics like these suggest it will overall be a good thing.

This is roughly the same annual emissions as for a million Americans (or 3 million normal people).

They think it’s a temporary bump and the AGI will tell them how to fix the climate crisis NEXT week. When the AGI comes (lol) it’ll just say “there’s decades of advice on how to save the planet but instead of doing that you built me, now it’s too late.”

Which, in addition to the energy means they'll be showing you 50% more ads (for worse search results).

Absolutely not

As people become less hysterical there will start to be more sober assessments of how much benefit AI will bring (some, very definitely, but less than promised) versus social cost in water, electricity etc (a LOT more than people have been willing to recognise so far). Not before time.

Fuck no, not getting more value.

NO!!!!!

I would suggest I am getting something like 1/3 of the service value out of google that I did back in the day. So google is currently running at 22% efficiency compare to previous, from my point of view.

I go deeper into the AI solutionism they've tweaked in the report, and the efficiency-washing they've badly worsened Please go have a read (and share it if you like it) A treat: Google disclosed water consumption in 'golf course equivalents', so I put it in context: ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/g...

Decentralization is not just an ecological alternative; but the only thermodynamically stable survival strategy for highly complex cognitive systems. You don’t build a gigantic, vulnerable brain that requires its a coal-fired power plant when you can instead create an decentralized sun powered mesh

Les data centers IA pourraient absorber 20 % de l'électricité mondiale d'ici 2030. Le mix nucléaire français est un atout bas-carbone réel — mais sans régulation, il disparaît. Un moratoire sur les centres non décarbonés et une taxe carbone progressive s'imposent.