> The world’s data centers already have roughly the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry While this is true, it does need to be put into persp

> The world’s data centers already have roughly the same carbon footprint as the global aviation industry While this is true, it does need to be put into perspective. People's appetite for computing isn't likely to go away. A thousand people sharing a compute resource in the cloud might be more efficient than those same thousand people each having to do those same computations on bigger beefier machines in their homes. One of the reasons laptops can be so small nowadays is that they're doing less locally; that's explicitly part of the strategy e.g. for Chromebooks, or for Adobe's Creative Cloud. Also, our connectedness through those data centers sometimes saves energy by allowing people to work from home instead of commuting. So yes, there is a problem with the energy cost of computing, but using data-center consumption as a proxy for that is a bit like using increased wind/solar energy production as a proxy for excess overall energy use. The problem is on the demand side. The suppliers are often doing the best they can, and an increase in a particular supply segment might sometimes be a good sign. Of course, I'm biased, because my day job involves making the storage part of data centers work more efficiently.