Gather round for the story of the Very Hungry Data Centre...

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#datacentre #ai

Tips for ethical AI use:

1. Don't

December I’ll be back on the job market!

Looking to counter:
- police surveillance tech
- smart city tech being repurposed as surveillance

Especially at the intersection of racial residential segregation in the US.

My background is in public interest tech, tech, and sociology.

Prefer advocacy org to municipal government, but I’m open-minded.

I’ve worked remote for 15+ years and my disability kind of makes it necessary for that to continue.

#GetFediHired #police #surveillance

Finished Kae Tempest’s novel “Having Spent Life Seeking” over the weekend. There were moments which were utterly dark and heartbreaking, and moments that were overflowing with beautiful, queer joy - and throughout, gorgeous prose. Strongly recommended. ❤️
https://bookpile.org/b/9781787335370

We report: when we get to the shore in the blue hour, the gulls pay us no mind, their shrieks too loud in our morning ears. The sand under our feet is dry, but feels liquid for how cold it is. The sky is opaque, waiting for some pink to bleed through in the next half hour.

Spending the weekend at #RubyRetreat and appreciating the Sydney Harbour views, the walks with Rubyists, and the birdlife.

It has taken since May 13 when I finished "Every Word a Mountain" to get this ... essay? I guess? out of my head and into a form I could share. It's been hard to just shape these thoughts.

I finally present: "Dreams Light the Path to our Future"

https://blog.aurynn.com/2026/7/02-dreams-light-the-path-to-our-future

Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Google’s latest climate report, but holy hell, I did not expect this.

The company’s total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025. This is very easily the biggest increase in their electricity consumption ever, and it puts them way ahead of Microsoft. It is almost certainly a reflection of the obscene energy hunger of their ever-expanding bloated generative AI systems, and a vindication of the warnings we’ve been raising for several years now.

I’ve updated all the report figures in my data tracking page, here. For the first time, I’ve compiled Google’s electricity consumption back to 2011, to give a historical view of what is happening here, because my description does not do this justice:

To give you some sense of scale here, this is what Google’s current consumption looks like, relative to the energy consumption of a bunch of country’s power grids:

Google’s power consumption rose by 7 TWh between 2023 and 2024. That was bad. But it rose by a whopping 12 TWh between 2024 and 2025, almost double last year’s increase. Google’s power consumption isn’t just growing – the rate at which it is growing is growing. We have a word for this: exponential growth.

The power grids that Google’s data centres are plugged into have to increase generation to match this new demand – and that includes rising use of coal and gas, and as a consequence, worse climate disasters like deadly heatwaves. Google’s consumption is rising way faster than the grids are being cleaned up with renewables, and that means their emissions number is going up fast, too. It’s the steepest rise on record:

Read Google’s report, and they sort of mumble through this problem:

“While we remain deeply committed to sustainability, reaching our climate moonshot is getting harder. Growing our data center footprint to build out the infrastructure needed to make AI as helpful as possible to everyone requires energy and resources”

“While the path to achieving our climate ambitions will not be linear—given our AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonizing—we remain focused on scaling abundant and affordable clean power globally and progressing technological innovations that drive down emissions across our operations and the broader industry”

They’re not wrong here. The path to ‘achieving their climate ambitions’ is not linear. It is looking more like an exponential, going in the exact wrong direction:

If “AI infrastructure buildout is currently accelerating faster than the grid is decarbonising” then Google shouldn’t be building AI infrastructure. If they are breaching the boundaries of safe operation on a planet that can only take so much, they should stop and consider whether all of this is worth it.

Think about what Google’s AI services have done for you. Does it seem worth it? Are you getting a deadly heatwave’s worth of use, out of PDF summaries and AI overviews?

While Google have clearly toned down the “net benefit to AI” language we criticised in a report earlier this year, they’ve invented some absurd new AI ‘benefit ‘avoided emissions’ claims that don’t hold up to scrutiny. They’ve ramped up their ‘efficiency-washing’ a few notches: a tactic that badly downplays the real, absolute impact of their decisions. They’ve written up substantial clean energy deals, but those deals lack critical information for us to know how meaningful they really are.

Despite this greenwashing bonanza, Google doesn’t even bother to pretend to be on track for its climate goals. Mix the foolish decision-making of FOMO-ridden executives with the most stunningly inefficient software tool big tech has ever created and you end up with a formerly efficient company turned into a blunt Bitcoin-style climate bomb, weirdly still convinced they’re saving the planet.

AI solutionism – toned down but still a problem

In ‘The AI Climate Hoax‘, we (a group of accountability, anti-disinformation and climate groups) told the story of how Google could not stop claiming that “AI” could reduce global emissions by 5 to 10% by 2030 (including in their 2024 sustainability report). That statement didn’t come from a study or an analysis, but from a consulting group’s sloppy guesstimate extrapolated from a random conversation. This was a claim that was a headline statement Google used in policy recommendations for the European Union!

We also found Google was among many companies smooshing together old, low-energy forms of AI (like wind forecasting) with the generative slop tsunami: falsely coupling them to pretend you can’t have one without the other. Essentially, justifying their private jet sales because they also sold a bicycle.

In this new report, Google have stopped claiming “AI” is destined to have a ‘net benefit’ to society, and notably, they stopped making the 5-10% claim after our report launched.

This is good. But there is still a strong focus on tactically vague AI solutionism throughout the new report, trying to more subtly present non-generative AI as if it somehow neutralises or offsets the massive, unstoppable harm of generative AI:

Everything presented here is ‘traditional’ AI, ie, the old, low energy machine learning systems. Nowhere do Google explain these technologies are wildly different to generative AI.

Google’s total claim for emissions reductions “enabled” by their products is a whopping 41 million megatonnes of CO2-e, more than the company’s entire footprint by a good margin. Most of this comes from the extremely absurd claim that Google Earth (!) enables the siting of clean energy projects – and so Google claims credit for the entire emissions reductions of all those projects for the full year of 2025:

I mean. Come on. There are so many satellite imagery programs out there. They could do the same thing for Google Docs or Gmail and get similarly huge numbers. This is such weak logic, and it’s the bulk of this headline number.

These are very, very significant claims from one of the world’s biggest companies, but the entire space of ‘avoided emissions’ statements like these is totally unregulated. Every single claims comes with the footnote “The data and claims have not been independently verified”. And Google doesn’t share enough information for anyone to do even try do an independent verification for things like ‘fuel efficient routing in Google maps’ or thermostat energy efficiency savings.

Efficiency-washing

As I wrote here last year, Google’s key tactic has been hyper-focusing on the energy consumption of a single, simple query to a chatbot, and highlighting how that has decreased over time, to mask how their absolute energy consumption has completely flipped out beyond belief.

In this report they really ramp up that nonsense. First they calculate what their emissions may have been had they performed no energy efficiency actions at all, and then present those emissions against their claimed total:

Above, Google claims nearly 41 MTCO2-e of avoided emissions thanks to machine hardware and software / computing efficiencies. Again, this is more than their entire emissions footprint. And again, this hasn’t been independently verified and we cannot even begin to try, because Google don’t release all the information we would need to figure if this number is being juiced by dodgy assumptions.

It is actually pretty likely that it was Google’s efficiency actions that enabled their total energy consumption to increase. It’s well known that, in this type of context, efficiency just gets eaten up by capitalistic greed, enabling even worse expansion. The International Energy Agency has said as much:

Whatever the dynamic here, Google is still ultimately seeing a massive, unprecedented rise in their emissions and energy consumption, seemingly for little reward. Their energy consumption per $m of revenue earned has grown 1.5x:

Google also repeat the tactically narrow focus on single queries, intended to present a clearly misleading visual of reduced impact:

Cool! Every chatbot query is only 9 seconds of TV! Let’s just compare this number to their total energy consumption…..

Let’s very conservatively assume only 15% of Google’s 2025 energy consumption was for AI. The company would have to receive 74.6 billion prompts a day, according to the 0.24 watt hour number above, to explain their energy hunger. ChatGPT, which is several times more popular than Google Gemini, claimed to receive 2.5bn prompts a day, in 2025.

If we assume 25% of their 2025 energy was generative AI, they’d need 124bn a day to explain the energy consumption. If 50%, they’d need 248bn (every single human being alive, including babies, sending 30 Gemini prompts per day).

Obviously, this is not happening. What is happening is that GenAI’s climate harm comes from the system design, such as Google’s AI overview triggering constantly whether users want it or not, in addition to significantly worse digital bloat tools dominating overconsumption.

The International Energy Agency explained this nicely, as well:

As they say above, the real problem lies in automated and recursive chatbot use, video generation and enterprise use (see: tokenmaxxing).

https://bsky.app/profile/ketanjoshi.co/post/3mkjwukvdpw2d

Google are painting a shockingly misleadingly picture by focusing narrowly on their ‘efficiency’ metrics, whether that’s per-prompt or highly suspicious gargantuan avoided emissions figures. Both hide the fact the company is simply choosing the climate-wrecking road, consciously.

Other bits and pieces

Google claim to have brought 12 gigawatts of “net-new” clean energy online in 2025. If that’s true, it’s great. But the details are scarce and the caveats are ominous. These could be long-term power purchasing deals that have a strong effect of bringing new clean energy online, but they could also be comprised of weaker certificate trading. Why is there a “net” before “new”? It’s never explained.

These are important questions with unclear answers. Google’s headline emissions figure includes the various power deals and certificate purchases, and the difference is stark:

Google have been far less bad than many other technology companies, supporting large-scale clean energy projects and long-duration energy storage. They also support greater efforts to more closely match power consumption to renewable generation. On the flipside, Google has been pouring cash into gas and blatantly-not-going-to-happen CCS and fusion projects.

Ultimately, their power consumption emissions are rising whether you include these projects or not. Even their deep pockets can’t keep pace with their rising energy hunger.

This is the first time Google have disclosed water consumption for individual data centres (I think), and they weirdly include a table showing ‘golf course equivalent’ water consumption for each. I assume this was meant as a minimisation tactic following the whataboutism trope used by AI and data centre boosters, but I found the numbers pretty significant.

I hate golf courses: they’re the seizure of a massive amount of land and they consume an ongoing massive amount of public resource, all for the private enjoyment of a wealthy few. What a perfect metaphor for generative AI. If you have golf courses, you should hate data centres at least just as much, and usually, significantly more so.

The huge gap between “raw” and “claimed” total emissions comes from Google’s use of renewable energy deals and certificates, but a good chunk also comes from Google simply excluding a giant chunk of the emissions in their supply chain (“scope 3”). I’ve presented both below. Amusingly, they call the smaller number “ambition-based” emissions. They exclude much of the good and services they purchase from third parties on the grounds they can’t influence them. But they don’t disclose exactly what these are, so we can’t really check.

Google also blend Category 2 (capital goods) and Category 11 (use of sold products). This blended figure dominates their scope 3 emissions, and they also notably don’t exclude it from their headline numbers. Of course, this includes the stuff needed to build data centres, so that must be driving much of the rise in scope 3 in total.

@godotengine LOUDER !

AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing. Reviewing PRs is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor (who may become a future maintainer/reviewer). If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review.

society is currently grappling with such questions as "I want to use the plagiarism machine but in my heart I know it's wrong, how do I justify it to myself?" and "I want to use the plagiarism machine but other people might think I'm bad for plagiarising, how do I justify it to myself?" and don't forgot "there must be a role for the plagiarism machine in education but plagiarism is bad, how do I justify this to my students"

Beautifully written explanation of why Europe’s heatwave must not be normalised, whether it’s to “but that’s every summer in Australia” or to “I guess this is just what summer will be like in Europe from now on”.

There is still time to mitigate some level of climate change, and we don’t want to waste that opportunity with apathy and inertia.

#heatwave #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

France Is Hotter Than the Sahara. This Is Everyone’s Warning.
https://www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/france-is-hotter-than-the-sahara-this-is-everyone-s-warning

Ok, just to sum it up for those following along at home:
NordVPN: confidence scam, the Raid: Shadow Legends of VPNs
Surfshark: owned by NordVPN
Mozilla VPN: reseller of Mullvad
Tailscale: partners with Mullvad
ExpressVPN: Israeli
Private Internet Access: ditto
ZenMate VPN: ditto
CyberGhost VPN: ditto
Windscribe: edgy branding, transphobic, uses slurs on social media
ProtonVPN: sponsors French fascists
MullvadVPN: donates millions to Swedish fascists

am I missing any?

e: if you are here looking for ones you SHOULD use, these were recommended to me and seem to check out:
https://vpn.ccrypto.org
https://njal.la
or self-host your own:
https://amnezia.org/self-hosted

I'm sitting on a tram, writing unit tests with RSpec - a kid looking over my shoulder talking to their mates: “oh my god, look at the hacks!”

I'm presuming/hoping they think I'm a hacker, rather than critiquing the quality of my code. 😅

“It was lunchtime when I caught my father in his regular pose – seated at the kitchen table, his chair angled toward the courtyard and beyond. There, his gaze wandered the grey clouds in search of an opening to a hidden sun.”

This piece by Antoun Issa is such a beautiful reflection on migration, loss, and family.

https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/if-only-they-knew-the-toll-of-migration

I want Enron-level congressional hearings when the AI industry collapses.

I want everyone to know the names of the guys who stole the future from millions of people.

No website or confirmed dates yet, but: I’m going to be running the next RubyConf AU under the auspices of @rubyau, tentatively aiming for February 2027, and of course it'll be in Narrm/Melbourne.

Currently talking to venues, and hoping to get the finer details locked in soon - but for Rubyists elsewhere in the world, let me plant the seed of an idea now: maybe you want to visit Melbourne early next year? Make a holiday of it! 😎 #rubyconf_au

(Also: if you're interested in helping, give me a yell! ☺️)

Kind of an emergency situation. 🫠

I've had some expenses sneak up on me, and I could use some money right now.

No free hand outs though. I want to work for it.

Looking for people who want their website fixed or completed, and can pay. We can talk on Zoom beforehand. Reach out to hi@loukoz.com

📍 I am based in Melbourne. I'm happy to work with locals or people overseas. Location is not a barrier - the only exception is if I need to know how your local banking or shipping works.

Please tag someone if you know someone looking for help.

In no particular order, today involves three work meetings, a haircut, gym, COVID/flu shots, a brief hello to my mum and nephew, and speaking at the Melbourne Ruby meet.

Very much looking forward to getting home tonight. 😅

Listen, if we can create trillionaires and billionaires in a day, surely we can destroy trillionaires and billionaires in a day.

I believe in us.

Please see description below and, if you or someone you know is interested, message directly - I can share additional details and put you in contact with the household 🏘️ 🏘️

"We are looking for someone to join us in intentionally sharing our home as it emerges with and around the people who live and gather on this quarter-acres of land we are stewarding on Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

The large private room is part of a 2.5-bedroom weatherboard cottage and comes fully furnished and all utilities included for $1,100/month, or as otherwise agreed, for an initial 3-4-month stay; with the option to continue by mutual agreement.

The cottage has wood combustion heating and reverse-cycle air conditioning and includes another private room, as well as shared kitchen, living/dining, study, bathroom, and covered porch.

This cottage sits at the heart of a quarter-acre permaculture-designed block in West Castlemaine. This block includes additional personal living spaces and common areas, as well as fruit trees, veggie gardens, chickens, and a friendly dog.

We share general household responsibilities and benefits while practicing communicating what we need and building healthy relationships together. We also welcome participation in maintaining gardens, dog and chicken care, and site maintenance and development.

There are currently 3 of us living across different parts of the property, and everyone has their own private space so there's plenty of room to do your own thing.

We are also part of broader communities. So, sometimes we’re each doing our own things and connect via impromptu share meals, sometimes we host multiple guests and cultivate an opt-in social atmosphere, and sometimes we coordinate quieter times of togetherness.

It's an unusual set-up, and perhaps easier to get a sense with a visit and a chat. Thanks!"

#Castlemaine #DjaDjaWurrungCountry #CoLiving #Housemates #IntentionalHousing #IntentionalCommunity #permaculture