Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba makes 9 datacenter energy patents available Chinese tech giant Alibaba is joining a coalition pledging to freely distribute energy efficient and green technologies, and has made nine patents available as part of the deal. The patents Alibaba is giving to the Low Carbon Patent Pledge (LCPP) mostly involve parts of its own in-house "soaking server" liquid immersion …
So, the bottom line is Alibaba is polluting more.
Well, increasing the number of datacenters is going to have that effect. As such, you can apply that argument to every single tech giant today. Amazon, IBM, Borkzilla, they're all doing it. And ?
The bottom line is this : nuclear (fusion when we get it) is the future.
You don't like that idea ? Fine, throw away your smartphones, your IoT shit, your electric car, your washing machine (and dryer), your dishwasher and everything else but your LED lights, your fridge, freezer, TV and sound system.
If we get back to the bare minimum, then yeah, solar, wind and a few coal plant will be enough. But we're not going to do that.
So, while Greenpeace studiously ignores all the coal plants that are being fired up to cope with the fact that its activities for the last fifty years have stifled the only viable solution we have, don't blame datacenters for doing their job.
We need nuclear. Not pressure water reactors that make plutonium so we can get yet more world-destroying nuclear bombs, no. We need Thorium reactors, and fusion reactors when we can get them. Once we have that, two smartphones and an electric car per person will be less of a problem, and datacenters won't be a problem at all.
Fine, throw away your smartphones, your IoT shit, your electric car, your washing machine ... and everything else ... well if that's going to help us to a carbon-free world, then think how much better it would be if we eliminated Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok etc, etc, etc? They use massive amounts of power globally and we do with our continuous social media interactions.
I would be so happy to go back to the days when I sat in a field watching the Pink Floyd and then Nice on a stage about 20 feet away, and then a few weeks later watching Al Stewart changing a string on his guitar and start singing again ... sure, it wasn't 100% carbon free but it was way less than sitting in the living room and watching a 98" TV.
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