I wonder though, if compute was solely on-premise, would we be using so much of it? My instincts tell me that because the cloud is so easy to spin up new compu

I wonder though, if compute was solely on-premise, would we be using so much of it? My instincts tell me that because the cloud is so easy to spin up new computation resources, that we're just using that much more of it. If a company had to buy the hardware, buy the licensing, buy the time of the system administrator, would they scale up as large? The cloud has driven efficiency gains. But those gains have been consumed and, under the premise above, even exceeded. The cloud might very well be contributing to more energy use than it would have otherwise. Unsure on this, of course. Just a gut feeling. It would be interesting if someone did an actual study on this.