How so? Is the hardware that special? One computer is much like the next you just have to be creative in repurposing them. Linux runs on millions of devices that a great deal of the population would consider highly obsolete. Just an example, I’m not saying that that’s the actual answer to this question. It might be, I’m just kind of completely ignorant as to what kind of hardware these companies are installing… It sounds like a lot of memory and a lot of GPU power.

Well they will probably be massively over capacity. But then you could run the for half a day during sunlight hours and just use solar. Solar PM and wind kite power basically gives us near infinite super cheap energy at certain times, so you could still make use of those compute centers. Turn them off during the night, modernize the cooling and noise dampening, add some solar and you can use the compute to run models to create new medicines like anti-cancer meds or protein folding. Unlikely that's going to happen but that is what a sane civilization would do with all that compute.

I think you explained it well… My father got let go from GE when their nuclear power plant business collapsed.

I call us a nuclear family as a bit of dry humor. That said I still hold out some hope for it as a viable means of energy production. The two key meltdowns that took it off the game board were preventable human error.

Chernobyl is an environmental nightmare… but largely caused by combination of ignorance and hubris. Three Mile Island could have gone much worse… nobody died, no significant contamination. More recently Fukushima… but again, had the backup generators been properly elevated above historical flood levels it would not have been a meltdown.

Solar has some environmental concerns that are currently being largely ignored. The panels currently used some nasty stuff that stays hidden in china where the bulk of them are produced… but there are advances in new panel chemistry on a regular basis, hopefully a few of those will scale.

Hydro can be done well, it generally isn’t, but there’s some notable exceptions, Niagara Falls comes to mind.

But ultimately all that would be a complete waste on Ai… I don’t think the reliability will ever quite get there. It has its applications, always has… but general intelligence isn’t really one of them, IMHO. That said I know scores of people that are not even 92% accurate, so who knows? ;-) I certainly wouldn’t mind a robot slave to do my chores… but Ai isn’t really the issue there. You don’t need a “thinking machine” to do laundry and vacuum. Thought I suppose you didn’t need an Android either…

Robot vacuums seem to work quite well, and once someone makes an affordable automatic washing machine capable of being loaded with a hopper and spitting nicely folded clothes out the other end you don’t need an anthropomorphic robot. The value there is only in adapting to a world of appliances built for bipeds.

But as humans (in the royal sense) we do a lot of dumb things that could more easily be handled with a phone call/email/video chat.

Basing anything on a finite resource like natural gas is ultimately the wrong idea… Hopefully, we perfect something better, I really don’t care what it is as long as it’s better :-)