Rowland Willets
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rowlandwillets.bsky.social
Rowland Willets
@rowlandwillets.bsky.social
47 followers 200 following 1 posts
Software Engineer & Amateur Photographer. Interested in Nature, Conservation & Rewilding.
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Reposted by Rowland Willets
ketanjoshi.co
You can probably guess why it's so misleading: computation has been shifting from 'on premises' to centralised data centres for almost an entire decade now!!

The real problem is not "data centres exist", it's "data centres are expanding too fast"!!!

iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/601ea...
consumption, including the migration of service demand to more efficient, larger data centres (colocation, service provider and hyperscale), but also continued improvements in hardware efficiency and operating efficiency (declining idle power ratios, for example). Figure 2.3 ⊳ Total data centre electricity consumption by equipment type and data centre type, 2005-2024 IEA. CC BY 4.0. After a decade of limited growth, data centre electricity consumption began to accelerate again after 2015 Note: GW = gigawatt; TWh = terawatt hour. Sources: IEA analysis based on data from IDC (2024a), OMDIA (2025), and SemiAnalysis (2025). However, a sharp acceleration in data centre electricity consumption took place from around 2017 onwards. Important drivers of this step change were the growth of cloud computing, the shift to online media consumption, the wider use of social media platforms and the rise of AI, which increased the demand for high-performance computing, facilitated by the rise of accelerated servers. Between 2015 and 2024, the capacity of accelerated servers grew four times faster than the total capacity of servers. While accelerated servers are much more efficient on a per-task basis, they also unlocked many new tasks, that were not possible on conventional servers. These new capabilities, among other factors, drove an increase in service demand that outstripped the pace of continued efficiency improvements. Figure 2.4 provides another view of the drivers of electricity consumption by data centres from 2005 to 2015 and then from 2015 to 2023. From 2005 to 2015, global Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, mobile broadband subscriptions and active social media accounts grew by more than 25% per year. These are proxies for the rapid initial growth in demand for digital services. Growth rates moderated in the period from 2015 to 2023. In contrast, the growth rate of the total stock of servers in data centres accelerated from an annual gro
December 3, 2025 at 12:08 PM
Reposted by Rowland Willets
emorwee.bsky.social
Highly recommend setting aside some time to read the full investigation into Oregon's AI-fueled toxic drinking water crisis by @rollingstone.com and @thefern.org

It’s one of the most important pieces of accountability reporting I’ve seen this year
‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis | Food and Environment Reporting Network
In the spring of 2022, Jim Doherty kept having the same conversation with folks at the only grocery store in Boardman, his eastern Oregon hometown, or at the grain depot where he picked up food for…
thefern.org
November 25, 2025 at 8:26 PM