In the report where Microsoft discloses its ever-worsening environmental harms, it tries to sort of plead away consequences by claiming that using different, irrelevant and unrelated forms of AI morally neutralise the damage they're doing with ever-expanding slop factories
Far from "driving the energy transition", the data centre boom is swallowing up the mineral resources that were once meant to be going towards building technologies that help eliminate fossil fuels.
Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of protecting human safety and wellbeing, #2024943:
https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/catalyst-data-centers-looming-methane-surge/
Microsoft and NextDC threaten Australians with terrifying prospect of cleaner air, lower climate impacts, lower power bills and less noise in urban communities
The power infrastructure that caused NextDC's Australian data centre project to be delayed is *really* massive. Look at the size of these power poles relative to the homes. A neighbourhood now living inside a substation. And for what, exactly?
The first genuinely honest ad for generative AI I've ever seen, from Microsoft / CoPilot
A mediocre white guy sees his non-white colleague getting praised for good work, he asks AI to *literally copy it*, and then he gets all the praise instead:
"The resistance is new for the data centre sector, and similar to the pushback against new coal, oil and gas and mining projects in other parts of the country"
"Equinor will proceed with the Wisting field in the Barents Sea, around 180 kilometers from Bjørnøya, in an area used by seabirds....Scientists warn that an oil spill could have dramatic consequences for seabirds"
The American mind cannot process a vehicle that is not designed to kill as many pedestrian children as possible
A new Bloomberg analysis shows ~3,000 MTCO2-e of extra US power pollution between 2025-2035 thanks to data centre growth. That is:
= 84 new coal plants /yr
= 33k lost jobs globally
= 1.2m more ppl pushed into unlivable climate
https://carbonimpactstracer.com/#interactive-emissions-cascade
https://drawdown.org/carbon-in-context?quantity=3&units=gigatons&gas=co2&system=metric&basis=100
Anthropic frantically and mindlessly speed-building massive new polluting fossil fuel infrastructure but then also buying carbon removal offsets to "help address emissions" is such as perfect demonstration of why silicon valley has failed so spectacularly to actually help tackle climate change.
There is no more "climate tech". It's all Sloptech. No more "decarb" (they just carb, now).
https://web.archive.org/web/20261016234533/https://www.anthropic.com/policy/infrastructure
Anthropic outlines its approach to "responsible data centre development", and........explicitly promises to carpet bomb communities with massive, polluting new fossil gas plants.
This is what your Claude subscription is enabling:
https://web.archive.org/web/20261016234533/https://www.anthropic.com/policy/infrastructure
AI slop really is everywhere - in the examples below, in posts about climate solutions and, astonishingly, anti-AI and anti-data-centre content. I have no big point here, it's just depressing.
Also notable how these big accounts feel way more comfortable generating fake brown people than centring and boosting real brown people
Very much looking forward to speaking on this call at 1300 UTC today 🥰
Another day, another renewable energy project cancelled and replaced with a data centre (that will raise emissions and fossil fuel use)
Data centre developers may build 'climate-wrecking' gas power plant next door
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c639mg9d1vp0o
One of the largest gas exporters in the US now providing off-grid gas power to data centres as well as gas processing terminals.
10 GW of gas ~ 40 MTCO2-e of annual emissions. Like opening 11 new coal plants.
Google signs a deal to remove 20,932 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. That is 0.07% of their unadjusted emissions in one year (2025)
"In our research at Cleanview, we keep coming across developers that are using jet engines to power their data centers"
Fun to read a sentence like that and it's just normal in 2026
Yet another fossil fuelled data centre for Anthropic, this one also facing significant pushback from people who don't want to suck in polluted air to power every LinkedIn guy's vibe-coded website
