Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacen...
The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption.
Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after passing 20 percent in 2023 and 14 percent in 2021 – up from just 5 percent way back in 2015.
Pluralism? What’s that?
Yes, maybe they’re building too many right now, who knows. It’s very likely that demand for computation will go up in the future, and EVs are also going to be consuming much more electricity, so all governments better start preparing for more (clean) electrical supply.
That’s not the same as conceding that “everyone should get as much compute as they demand”.
However, there's probably no limit to energy/electricity we can usefully allocate. And therefore yes, we should in fact provide as much as possible, Dyson spheres and all.
Dyson spheres are science fiction. Science fiction is fiction.
Training is quite expensive and it does look likely that the American providers have been doing that at a loss.
In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in, and 140W is not exactly a huge amount of power (roughly 50¢ per day if you run it 24/7 at 100% load, which it is very unlikely you will).
None of the big providers are profitable. It’s subsidised by overly enthusiastic VCs.
> In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in
Right, people could. But they won’t, because that’s a bloody expensive computer and they don’t need that to ask ChatGPT. That war is lost already.
Subscription to the big players’ services would need to increase massively for that to happen. And the computational cost is only part of the problem; these models also eat a lot of storage and RAM, which is not exactly getting cheaper.
You can look at API pricing on a service like OpenRouter (which isn't subsidised) and see pretty readily that it's not expensive to provide lower-tier inference. Higher-tier inference like GPT-5.6-Sol or Opus is expensive - $100 a month plan for realistic usage, and only up from there.
You can run Qwen-3.6 on a 32GB card which will set you back about $1400, or $400 of just RAM if you want to run it on a CPU.
Well... why else would the major providers now tighten the screws on per-token pricing?
I'm not aware of how Musk/SpaceX are "raiding retirement funds"?
NASDAQ bent their rules to allow SpaceX a (way too early) inclusion into the index and so did MSCI [2] and Russell [3].
Normally, a newly IPO'd stock would have required up to a year of "cooldown" (like the S&P 500 requires) so that stock prices can stabilize. Now though? Billions of dollars in funds are automatically flowing in from retirement accounts into SpaceX and artificially prop up the valuation of this grossly overvalued company. And OpenAI and Anthropic are looking to IPO as soon as possible as well to benefit from the same rules while the markets are still red-hot bullish for anything that can be labeled even remotely related to AI.
Assuming that there will be a catastrophic collapse event in the AI bubble - the triggers can be anything from regulatory issues (no matter if in the US, EU or China), new free models from China cutting off the moat of the Big Three, venture capital running out and forcing realistic pricing or a natural disaster/war wiping out TSMC or RAM factories, interrupting supply for the continued outbuild -, this will directly (and massively) impact retirement accounts.
In addition, even the sell-offs required in ETF rebalancing can have serious economic consequences. Something has to give when SpaceX, OAI and Anthropic all enter.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nasdaq-che...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/msci-confirms...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/russell-rebal...
Using AI to do this seems extremely inefficient and wasteful, not to mention improper and unprofessional, and that is looking past the moral implication of training on stolen code and polluting our climate.
GLM 5.2 is not subsidised - it is an Opus tier model that costs a small fraction. I doubt you would be okay and all problems would suddenly vanish.
But the real standout on price is DeepSeek V4 Flash, which competes, more or less, with models in between Sonnet and Haiku. From third-party providers, it costs around $0.09/M, $0.18/M out, compared to $3M/in, $15M/out for Sonnet and $1M/in, $5M/out for Haiku. To get the price of DSv4 (Flash and Pro) so low, DeepSeek did a lot of innovative optimization work that will likely show up in other open weight models in the future.
Plainly it was not a "need" since people managed for thousands of years without it.
This is what progress looks like.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pluralism
It seems that HN commenters don’t understand what collectivism is.
There are laws in the EU that will save the planet, like drinking from soggy paper straws instead of normal ones and requiring caps stay attached in plastic bottles.
And just to make sure, at least in Poland they now charge you $0.10 if you buy anything plastic until you bring it back to the grocery store empty.
We are safe.
So the answer is to build the damb nuclear power and a lot of it and price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
If they're so keen to build that they're willing to fund power generation (e.g. on site gas generators) then it should be clean/renewable (solar, wind, small modular reactors, full scale nuclear plants, whatever).
Degrowth is bad but so is ignoring the planet, the environment, and people's health to get ahead faster in business.
A typical US DC costs about $35b per GW. Solar and battery would increase that to about $45b.
Then during summer it would generate so much excess power that it would run all the domestic air conditioning you could need.
This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.
BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...
Often repeated everywhere as a trump card to get what they want - crush technological and economic progress.
I don't know what exact strawman you're arguing against, although I'm sure you can always find some idiots saying something like what you say. But scientific consensus has long been that it will lead to increasingly extreme weather and mass extinction, which we seem to be on track for. Of course, we can't know for sure what the consequences are untill we do the experiment, which in this case means potentially destroying large sections of the biosphere and living with increasingly destructive weather patterns. Surely that risk is worth at least legislating that hyperscalers need to spend some of their billions on solar panels?
Worse than voluntarily inviting masses of incompatible cultures into western countries like we're already doing?
And while the populist right love importing incompatible cultures en mass, that will have to stop.
We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its exactly the people in the third world that don't need climate change lecture because it is absolutely needed to increase their energy and emissions output to reduce deaths.
Lots of people in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Africa, India _already die_ not due to climate change but lack of productivity.
They definitely don't want holier than though westerners to tell them to reduce their emissions as if it doesn't come at any tradeoff whatsoever.
> Already even our wealthy societies are being strained by rising food prices
False. There's no sustained rising of food prices.
> We don’t know exactly what the tipping points would lead to but we do know it would be some degree of a more severe and abrupt decline across the board.
Its convenient to be vague about consequences. Then you can use the vagueness to oppose whatever you want. Don't like something someone's making? You can just say "but we don't know exactly what the tipping point is so you are not allowed to do that thing".
That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.
At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".
What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before? Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?
And they'll ride the transition to green energy for "free".
In Europe this is covered by the emission trading system (EU ETS) and datacenters have to share the same shrinking emissions quota as other industries.
An alternative is what Google is theoretically aiming for: being carbon-free. But they've already started using language describing it as a moonshot or idealistic goal so seems likely they'll abandon that
https://sustainability.google/reports/247-carbon-free-energy...
My state allowed the power utilities to charge a modest fee ($10,000 to $100,000, depending on project size) before a yet-to-be-built data centre could demand a large amount of electricity. The amount of planned data centres went down by an order of magnitude. The truth is that most of the data centre builders (not all) do not want to be responsible citizens and are simply extracting value and wealth from other people, including from the power utilities and grid operators.
/s
Microsoft latest report shows 25% emissions raised due to AI data centers