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.
Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.
The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better.
I'd be more OK with it if prices weren't subsidized so much and people actually had to pay to ask opus how to pee, then maybe we would realize we don't need beefier models for everything
There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
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).
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
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.
I agree with using smaller models, it's just that the majority of people I know feel like they need the biggest, beefier, behemoth model possible (with the longest thought setting) and consume much more than necessary when a flash or smaller model would be OK. I would also like to be able to use a smaller model, but given ram prices I would have to sell a kidney to buy ram now
GLM 5.2 isn't quite modern Opus tier, as seen in this comparison where Opus 4.5 scores 4/5 on some coding tasks where GLM 5.2 scores 0/5: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models But yes, GLM 5.2 is cheap.
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.
But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.
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
They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.
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.
Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.
> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
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...
If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.
"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding?
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?
> The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.
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".
For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.
However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.
The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.
You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.
Sure you can. The datacentre builders just don't want the (fairly modest) extra expense to do so properly. Obviously some preparatory work is required before dumping a lot of extra capacity into the grid.
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.
In related current news:
Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/07/11/irish-datacen...
Luckily this will all be offset by the pot of gold at the end of the AI rainbow.23 percent is a bit fucked actually
One more datacenter bro one more datacenter bro please I swear bro one more datacenter and everything will be OK please bro
The optimal number of data centers is just enough so that my personal use is covered. No more. No less. Screw other people’s needs and demands because I know better.
Pluralism? What’s that?
I know that market, and people for that matter don't care, but the environmentalist in me questions the word "needs" in the context of using AI.
I'd be more OK with it if prices weren't subsidized so much and people actually had to pay to ask opus how to pee, then maybe we would realize we don't need beefier models for everything
There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
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).
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
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.
I agree with using smaller models, it's just that the majority of people I know feel like they need the biggest, beefier, behemoth model possible (with the longest thought setting) and consume much more than necessary when a flash or smaller model would be OK. I would also like to be able to use a smaller model, but given ram prices I would have to sell a kidney to buy ram now
> There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)
Well... why else would the major providers now tighten the screws on per-token pricing?
The fact is, you wouldn’t be okay with the real prices as well. All indications point to opus not being subsidised but having huge margins.
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.
GLM 5.2 isn't quite modern Opus tier, as seen in this comparison where Opus 4.5 scores 4/5 on some coding tasks where GLM 5.2 scores 0/5: https://www.tryai.dev/blog/gpt-5.6-build-off-12-models But yes, GLM 5.2 is cheap.
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.
But... Datacenters don't burn anything, right? Powerplants do and we try to switch all the transport and heating and whatever to be electric.
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
They do have a growing amount of Scope 1 emissions (emissions from their on site sources) which originally was primarily on site diesel but due to grid interconnect delays have been growing number of on site gas turbines.
This certainly wouldn’t be necessary with adequate generation and transmission capacity.
This is true, but I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that these data centres shouldn't be built, or at least allowed to operate until/unless they can be powered cleanly and without cornering the market and driving out existing consumers of power.
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.
Which is why things like nuclear power plants, grid upgrades, hydroelectric projects, and intelligently placed wind/solar (instead of placing it due to subdisies or political concerns) should have been done a long time ago.
> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere
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...
*raise the prices
The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself. This is not based on science.
Often repeated everywhere as a trump card to get what they want - crush technological and economic progress.
If enough climate systems collapse, lots of existing farms will no longer be viable. That means famine and migration, which means war, which means lots of death. I don't know anyone who thinks we'll see extinction (outside of possible "hothouse earth" scenarios, where we become a second Venus) but societal collapse is definitely on the table. Saying this is "not scientific" would just be you not understanding the science.
"Climate conspiracy"? Like you, mean, the conspiracy of climate scientists to publish facts to the best of their understanding?
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?
End humanity, maybe not. Causing very painful social changes, however, is absolutely on the cards.
More than on the cards, it is already happening.
> The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.
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".
For a context: France relies heavily on automotive transport, plus it's a home to enormous agricultural sector, tractors are literally everywhere in the country during the summer. To a certain degree, structurally it resembles USA a lot.
However they also quite famously rely on a majority of nuclear power for their electric grid. Great for France, but that makes them an already-low carbon emitter compared to many others and an ungenerous comparison.
We don't really need the French on the other hand, how could we live without AI?
Yeah, we are not talking about ecological impact of France enough
Yann Le Cun enters the chat...
Related:
Microsoft latest report shows 25% emissions raised due to AI data centers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48870229
Man, we are cooked, literally
The solution is simple: require datacenters to overprovision solar panels and grid-scale batteries for themselves, and use that capacity to strengthen the grid and transition off of hydrocarbons.
You can’t get a grid tie for those panels in most of the US right now. The process for connecting to the grid is done serially, and requires a large study for any new generation.
No idea what you're talking about. My local utility lit up 100MW of solar over the last year alone. Everywhere I look is doing the same.
He's talking about the interconnection queue. You see the 100MW of solar they're wiring up, but not the hundreds of gigawatts in the queue.
Sure you can. The datacentre builders just don't want the (fairly modest) extra expense to do so properly. Obviously some preparatory work is required before dumping a lot of extra capacity into the grid.
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.
No, wait! The increased productivity will lead to a decoupling of the economy from resources consumption and GHGs emission. Just one more data center.
/s
It’s such a tiring narrative isn’t it ?
Pretty small if you consider the value they provide, honestly.
And they'll ride the transition to green energy for "free".