New UK AI DataCentre könnte die fünfmalige Emissionen des Flughafens Birmingham verursachen
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/06/planned-ai-datacentre-in-england-could-cause-five-times-emissions-of-big-airport?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Von topotaul
22 Kommentare
We just had do do a carbon awareness day at work (fun) where they were all turn off lights, get a bike, eat less meat blah blah fucking blah and not once was AI mentioned.
These data centres should be built where cheap low carbon power is at hand.
UK has some of the most expensive electricity in the world
You’d need to be a moron to try and place any kind of commercial datacenter here
Yay! Lets say no to another economic sector on spurious environmental grounds.
Then let’s get more clean energy online to power it. We shouldn’t be holding up every new energy dependent industry because our infrastructure is outdated, we should improve the infrastructure.
Nice try, but it’s only the co2 made at the airport, not the whole flight
These units of measurement are confusing.
Can someone tell me how many fridges a Birmingham airport is?
Just what we need, AI slop farms that require huge amounts of energy, compromising our grid for normal consumers.
One of many reasons why this ai crap has to end, now. It’s so fucked up
It’ll also drive unemployment so it’s win win for the owners
Wow.
What’s the emissions stats on the near million people a year (net) we imported?
There is nothing special about this data centre because it focusses on AI. This is just a matter of fact when it comes to any data centre. Between hosting a website that is read by many millions of people each day and the analytics they will be complicit in through their advertising revenue. Then the Guardian itself is likely causing as much emissions as a fair sized airport. The question is whether or not you think the Guardian provides a service that justifies such large emissions.
While the Guardian might occasionally educate me on a topic. Le Chat is helping me work through a Linear Algebra textbook and learn how to solve the problems in it using NumPy and SymPy. I don’t have access to any people who could help me with such things. I don’t have access to instructors solutions manuals. If I’m unsure why something might be the case then I’d be shit out of luck. But now, as somebody from the ass end of nowhere in the UK, gain 24/7 access to a reasonably competent Maths tutor.
For example, yesterday I wasn’t sure about how to answer one of the True or False questions.
[https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/a75fa1e7-c6dc-4e69-b8eb-f9af762fa455](https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/a75fa1e7-c6dc-4e69-b8eb-f9af762fa455)
I saw that you could negate one of the matrices by left-multiplying. But I wasn’t sure where the y was coming from or what I could do with it. Seeing Le Chat write that out made me realise it just meant y in the sense that anything that could be substituted there that would make the equation remain true. Which it must given that we have constrained the equations to the form Ay = Ab.
Or what about the day before that where I was having trouble with a numpy program I’d written to check if I had inverted a matrix correctly and got the correct solution. I had forgotten that numpy.linalg.solve automatically inverts the matrix you give to it, but because I had been using this program earlier to check my working at inverting it then I passed it by mistake. Since I had only used numpy.linalg.solve before I wasn’t aware of numpy.matmul to calculate the product. Le Chat saved me at least quarter of an hour of stumbling around the numpy documentation to realise what I had done wrong.
[https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/0c3f6f59-9f67-4e94-9f23-91e2cb23bab6](https://chat.mistral.ai/chat/0c3f6f59-9f67-4e94-9f23-91e2cb23bab6)
It is a valid criticism that emissions are bad. But I will never use Birmingham airport. Or the next five equivalents. Why aren’t we shutting down Birmingham airport instead?
Every datacentre should be mandated to be built under / next door to a swimming pool.
The pool will cool the datacentre, and the datacentre will heat the pool.
Please think of all the poor university students having to do coursework and stuff though….. genuinely.
remember the idea of a „personal carbon footprint“ was made by BP.
Unless your being stupid egregious (i.e. private jets) the main problem is cargo shipping, ships transporting fossil fuels, deforestation to make way for beef production, war, and AI.
Sure AI might be cool tech with some use for someone, but that use isnt generating ghibli pictures of starmer shagging a horse or something. Its insane, huge companies on massivly overvalued stock running at a massive loss, ramming tech into things that dont need it; not to solve a percived consumer problem, but to juice their stock price.
Its the crypto/.com bubble all over again. Do we really want to burn down the planet so $nvidia can go up a few % points? this isnt against ai in all its uses, but right now its certainly a bubble that when it pops is gonna fuck over silicon valley; lets not fuck over the planet too.
Somewhere between the sentiment powering hyper-valuations of AI related stocks and the AI is a useless black hole sentiment expressed in many of the comments here, normal people are wondering what the hell am I going to do when my job is nicked by some Tech Bros‘ latest LLM.
Oh well, we shouldn’t allow it then.
They should bloody well build it in some other country instead… where it won’t do so much harm to the global atmosphere! /s
The paradox is that energy hungry tech is actually beneficial. The taxpayer today pays companies to turn off power sources when they generate too much, but that energy could be dumped into datacentres or proof of work algorithms instead of being wasted. That’s why bitcoin was such a missed opportunity to fund the green energy sector; it can be an intermittent energy user to match intermittent energy generation.
For some reason, the consultancy that did the Energy and Sustainability Statement in support of the planning application has used a Grid Electricity CO2 Coefficient (0.233 kg/kwh) from the 2020 version of DEFRA’s GHG Conversion Factors.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/government-conversion-factors-for-company-reporting
The 2025 factors are due to be published next week but the 2024 factor available for the past year is 11% lower at 0.207 kg/kwh due to wind, solar and nuclear now providing the majority of our grid generation.
Even more significantly the Government’s Clean 2030 programme forecasts that grid emissions will fall to less than 0.050 kg/kwh in 2030.
The actual emissions could be 25% lower than The Guardian are fretting about.
Projects like these are large enough that it makes sense for them to buy power using Virtual Power Purchase Agreements (VPPAs) with generators. This means their generator inputs as much power into the grid as the off-taker consumes (not necessarily at the same time). If they secure a PPA with one of the multiple GW offshore wind farms in development, their electricity emissions will be even lower.
This is an example of how environmental regulations are being weaponised by NIMBYs and BANANAs to block developments.
BS article
„Based on current grid electricity mix“
No Datacentre of this size being built now is going to be purely grid powered. They will install massive amounts of solar onsite and probably wind too with the necessary switchgear to take advantage of this directly onsite. Datacentres that use grid only get clobbered for carbon taxes based on their efficiency (or lack of).
It’s one of the big design factors in the modern Datacentre world.
Carbon footprint and emissions are total bullshit.
I’m about as eco as they come. Want driverless cars, solar panels etc but all the stuff you see above are bull.
Companies saying they are green and then having paper all over the office etc etc.
It’s all posturing.
Capitalism is a goddamn inefficient nightmare of an economic system. This is stupid.