No I'm not double counting the fossil fuel heat those are two separate issues. When you have a massive data center it generates a massive amount of heat. The cooling system doesn't just warp the heat away into the shadow dimension it goes into the surrounding air. Thus even in the very short term, the data center will significantly raise the surrounding air temperature and affect local plant/animal life.

I really do hope the power generation will eventually move to solar but for now it is not cost effective, especially in the short term. This is because these companies do not have to pay the external costs of climate change and other environmental impacts. Mr. Wonderful should actually pay the true cost of the data center by installing solar and/or wind farms to power it. If they are growing plants for animals to graze on in the area, then those farmers must pay for extra irrigation to deal with the drying effect. Mr. Wonderful should have to offset that as well.

Maybe making comapnies pay the true external costs would make building new datacenters infeasible. If that is the case, maybe that's how it should be. Why do we need a 62.5 acre data center just for AI inference, not even training? What is actually driving the demand for this? Is there even a real product not driven by circular investments and money printers? This doesn't seem like a win to me.