The building material isn’t the problem. The electricity used and the air conditioning are the problem. AI is only going to make this worse. Making a building from wood isn’t going to make a difference.
They’re literally recommissioning old NPPs and potentially commissioning brand new ones to get more cleanISH energy to power their data centers for AI in particular. But even if you get zero emissions energy, there’s a lot of emissions in the construction itself, which they seem to actually be addressing here.
Or they could be doing this just for the greenwashing, which is pretty likely with a gigacorporation like Microsoft.
That said, the timber constructions would likely look way better than concrete or steel so I’m all for it
This is just for construction though. If the data centre runs on fossil fuels, this is not going to be a meaningful contribution in reduction of GHG emissions.
No, no, look over here at this astroturf, see how GREEN it is? Progress is awesome.
Hype helps rally people. Remember Apple’s new HQ with all the talk about how green it is (it’s not).
What I wondered when people were excited about that was - what exactly does their building have to do with us? It’s not even a residential complex.
Same with MS DC’s. Stupid computing is the problem.
I want those companies to die, not to put a trenchcoat on their stupidity.
I don’t think “hype” is the right word. Maybe “buying into oligarch propaganda”; more wordy, but also more descriptive.
Mind you, I don’t have any issue with people using product X or product Y. The real problem is people regurgitating PR copytext about how “company X cares about your privacy” or whatever. This is just comically dumb, regressive almost. Why would an electronics or a software company give shit about anything and not always lie when it suits them? This makes no sense.
I think it’s because at some point it became fashion to think that businesses can “care”.
An irrational idea that this “emotion of caring” can make life a bit more utopian.
This in turn came to be reality due to mass media, press erosion.
Instead of small newspapers (kids make a school newspaper, adults make a town newspaper, there’s a county newspaper, and so on) most people rely on hugely centralized media representing what is the least relevant for those people - something that concerns them and everyone in the country or in the world similarly.
The thing is - people have conflicting interests, but when everyone is conscious of their own interest, the whole benefits. The finer divisions are, the better. That’s not the case with centralized news. Those make the interest common, integrated. Just all lumped together, no use at all.
The last few decades have seen increasing centralization in all areas.
Coming soon to a future headline near you:
“Big Microsoft Azure outage as termite infestation introduces new bugs”
Seriously tho how fucking stupid is the entire microsoft staff top to bottom? How can everyone’s first response to this announcement be “well this fixed a problem that didn’t exist” while everyone at Microsoft was either like, “yeah great job” or “yeah this will totally smoke screen the attention away from us fixing the actual problem for the 25th year in a row.” Fuck all things Microsoft. I’m so sick of their fuckin shit.
I think everyone at MS understand this is all BS. I am sure you have some true believer types, but I will speculate they are minority.
That being said, I will speculate that the people doing this research may have good intentions (while recognizing that this a small part of the problem).
