They do an upgrade, ever server/switch/router etc ends up in the dumpster

How many customers do this?

At least here in the Bay Area, hard drives and SSDs get destroyed, but a lot of the other equipment goes to e-waste recyclers who end up refurbishing it and selling it on marketplaces like eBay.

A lot of homelabbers get their equipment from eBay, and the source of that equipment is almost always second-hand data center equipment.

or they have devalued to zero so they cannot be sold for tax purposes.

Well that's just stupid. In my country, if you sell property that's been depreciated to zero (or lower than its sale price in general), you're just supposed to record it as profit.

Of course when you've depreciated something to zero and it's not something like a car where it's registered with the government, you could just give it away to employees or friends.

The amount of waste out there like this is tragic. I could understand destroying hard drives, but the rest of the hardware?

Even if they are perfectly good

Could that perhaps be an issue of stupid licensing? With, smart licensing, or whatever, if the license is non-transferable, then the hardware is basically an expensive paper weight.
I've heard Cisco used to give out Meraki devices for free on some events, because without a license they were totally useless. Until someone figured out how to run OpenWRT on them.

My estimates show that climate damage of data centers will cost more money than is on Earth! Spread the news...

The current investors are hoping to be rich enough to have their own compound by the time the climate catastrophe gets that bad. By the time they lose money, it will be fairly meaningless. This is why I’ve always hated measuring climate damage in dollars - we can’t measure real world catastrophe against a societal construct

People have the memory of a gold fish when it comes to anything long term, so they just vote against their best interest again because they're incapable of connecting the dots.

They understand money to some extent though, but even at that scale, not as much.

Because it's considerably cheaper to do it this way and they're being allowed to do so. Why would they spend money building giant cooling towers when they can just dump the hot water into the river and then drain main supply for fresh supply.

I’d assume it’s cheaper to fuck up the environment.

It’s as the case is with everything for these parasites: if it loses them too much money or makes them too little, they avoid it like the plague. It’s cheaper upfront to just run it through an open system.

They usually do. They just do the same thing a lot of nuclear reactors do and also evaporatively cool one end of the heat exchange loop.

It has shown that there's enough money around we could just tax it and solve our problems collectively. Not sure which height of tax rate would be as devastating for the economy as a bursting AI bubble.

Answer: stop-poll-ut-ting

Hint: Satire

In a sense, we are already at that point. Well... maybe not solve it, but at least slow it down. And maybe not help, but be part of the solution. And that solution is to shut it down.