AI is, sure. But data centers have been around for literally decades. There’s nothing bleeding edge about it.

We know how to run data centers efficiently and less wastefully. It’s just more expensive so these fucks don’t want to do it.

They could power themselves entirely from solar and wind. They won’t. They could use closed loop cooling. They won’t. Because those options are more expensive and AI isn’t profitable yet (if ever).

They could do like what you’re saying and turn their models into locally run things on the end user device. They won’t because the only way they’re making money right now at all is on the mass data they collect from it.

They don’t want the risk of actually having to design, build and market products to consumers. They want to sell a fungible commodity that someone else makes a product with, they get to make money regardless of the success or failure of any given product.

Ultimately, they’re not really interested in any of this because they think that it’s a useful technology. They’re only interested because the business model of building a bunch of data centers and selling the computer is simple and low risk. They wouldn’t be putting any money in to it if not for that business model.

Most of the leadership at these companies made their names in the cloud services and web hosting boom. They’re sticking to what they know and what has been the only really big success for the industry in the past decade.