I recently participated in a documentary called “Clouded II: Does Cloud Cost the Earth?” Please watch it. It looks at the issues surrounding cloud computing, its consumption of power, and thus its potential impact on the planet.
The documentary did an excellent job of balancing perspectives. I don’t think anyone is arguing that data centers should not exist, but those data centers should be efficient and minimize power consumption. This means optimizing the resources we use and moving away from the “store all the data” mentality we’ve had for the past 50 years. We created 64 zettabytes of global data in 2020, and it has gotten worse in the years since.
