Sunday long-read on the environmental impact of data centers.
"Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage."
"Some have proposed relocating data centers to Nordic countries like Iceland or Sweden, in a bid to utilize ambient, cool air to minimize carbon footprint, a technique called “free cooling.” However, network signal latency issues make this dream of a haven for green data centers largely untenable to meet the computing and data storage demands of the wider world."
"[…] the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states."
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-staggering-ecological-impacts-of-computation-and-the-cloud/