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New insult just dropped
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2026
935 points (98.6% liked)
Enough Musk Spam
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The sun is continuously delivering 173 petawatts (PW) of energy to the earth, the biggest planned datacenter will have a capacity of about 1 GW, or 0.000001 PW.
The heat created through datacenters, and all other human activity combined, is minuscule compared to the incoming heat delivered by the sun. The reason climate change is an issue isn't that humans are doing things that generate heat, it's that by dumping CO2 into the atmosphere we're preventing the earth from being able to effectively radiate that heat back into space.
The amount of heat the earth normally radiates is roughly equal to the amount of heat the sun delivers. But, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are preventing the heat from radiating into space. Instead it gets trapped in the atmosphere, so the planet warms up.
AI will take what it gets. Have 100 million of the 1G datacenters and earth is heated by two suns. If earth should not boil, far less data centers are possible on earth, which only leaves space for more computation power.
Ok, once we get to 90 million 1GW datacenters we should start worrying. Currently we're approaching 1.
If you just keep adding data centers they will get too hot to stay functioning though, also there's such a thing as thermal equilibrium and heat transfer through radiation increases as the thermal gradient increases. But if you hypothetically could keep building more compute then eventually you'll reach a point where you can't keep it cold enough to run and it stops working, I'm not sure what the actual numbers would be like or how much space it would actually take but right now we're still orders of magnitude away from heating the planet up more than a few degrees. It's an insane amount of energy to heat up a planet sized object meaningfully.