alt Hacker News>Growth trend matters more than absolute present value.
Only if the current absolute present value is enough that the resulting trend matters.
It was only 2 weeks ago when someone posted an article claiming data centers worldwide use 24x less water than golf courses worldwide.
And I mean, you need somewhere to collate all that climate data? You need telecoms to let scientists communicate?
>Driven by AI use, the US economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals. In advanced economies more broadly, data centres are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030, putting the power sector in those economies back on a growth footing after years of stagnating or declining demand in many of them.
If horse use trends continue at their current pace, London will be covered in 20 meters of horse manure by the end of the decade.
> In advanced economies more broadly, data centre's are projected to drive more than 20% of the growth in electricity demand between now and 2030
20% of the growth isn't much overall either is it? That's likely assuming that the million and 1 spruiked projects actually get off the ground.
Only if...
No.
If the trend continues.
Exponential growth, a/k/a constant periodic percentage growth (per day, month, year, etc.), increases rapidly. Differences (or errors) in magnitude measurement disappear rapidly: a factor of two in a single generation, a factor of ten in about three generations, a factor of 100 in less than 7, a factor of one thousand in fewer than 10.
What matters is that the growth rate continue.
Which of course, it usually doesn't. Most growth trends follow a sigmoid rather than exponential curve (initially), or more complex longer-term dynamics.
The point of your infamous horse quote was less to show that the Earth would be covered in horses (or their effluvia), than that the observed current trend could not reasonably continue. And as some of us are aware, it didn't, due to the adoption of ... the petroleum-fueled automobile ... which has some bearing on this particular HN post itself.
Had the automobile not come along, or petroleum reserves proved much more limited as was widely believed at the time[1], large horse-congested cities such as London, New York, and Chicago would likely have seen sharply slowed or even reversed growth under negative hygiene pressures. It was the multiple factors of growth in fossil fuel use (displacing horses, and their effluvia), development of sewerage systems, solid waste disposal, food safety and purity, refrigeration, and public health which turned cities from death zones to attractive living places, rather than merely drawing desperate immigrants through high wages amidst rampant rural and foreign poverty.
But the point remains that the sustained growth rate matters far more than the starting point.
2030 is three and a half years away. That's soon.
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Notes:
1. It wasn't until the 1930s with the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in the US and of vast fields in Saudi Arabia that it seemed likely that oil was more than a short-term resource. In marked contrast to, say, the short-lived Indian natural gas boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_gas_boom>. Daniel Yergin's The Prize is an excellent history of the industry's growth, though I disagree strongly with the author's strong allegiance to it.