Could be some astroturfing, but compared with fears of drag queen storytellers and wind farms, there is a lot of sentiment ready to be mobilized here. Externalities of data centers on this scale, and the outright lying on what's going on by their builders, are already visible. If there was astroturfing available we'd see the Koch brothers et al ramp up in favor of this, get Tea Party rabble-rousers to insist on data centers. Let's see how China deals with the impact on their land and water too.
The entire process has blind spots. Starting with adding more demand for electricity, more demand for mined materials that harm the people and environment. Amazon hasn't helped the global environmental footprint in any way. If you work in most forms of tech, you've agreed to not lose sleep over these things.
Nadella is good at messaging. It is difficult to actually believe he wants to do anything but push it as far and wide as possible, and addiction is fine. It's just spin on the wording.
When any entity grows sufficiently more powerful than others in its ecosystem, it can dominate the ecosystem in ways that might not have been foreseeable before it grew dominant. Perhaps they could have been foreseen but weren't, there are lots of potential problems in the world. If you want to let entities grow like SpaceX, you'll get these outcomes.
Sure, but has their rate of value added increased as a result? It's a good question to ask. They added value before LLM coding, and now are more expensive than before thanks to token costs.
Maybe not "you", but how motivated are you to be in control? Not as much as those who angle for the CEO and board chair roles, or to be kingmakers, or to run for various offices. And they very much tolerate being feared.
Money talks and leads action in forward capital investment
And despite political attacks on renewables, solar continues getting built in this red state because it’s one of the fastest and cheapest ways to add new electricity to the grid.
So that happens while public facing politico's say whatever soothes the coal rollers that want to hear another Taylor Sheridanesque bleatage about wind power and no solar at night.
While Texas is quite red. Renewables are surprisingly popular. Why should a farmer in the middle of nowhere have to rely on Texas’ power grid, when they can install a few solar panels and a battery. Especially when storms can take out power lines, or take out the entire grid.
I’m near a big city in Texas, and before any big storms here, generators frequently sell out at stores. Power outages are basically expected during any storms. Lots of people buying into solar (or backup generators/batteries) just for independence from the power grid. Especially after the huge winter storm a few years ago left people without power for days in the cold.
While fossil fuels are huge in Texas, solar and wind are too. Especially out in west Texas where there’s a lot of wide open space, wind turbines are surprisingly frequent. Texas produces the most wind power out of any state. And solar works just about anywhere in Texas. Lots of sun in the summers.
After ERCOT humiliated itself in front of the entire state (twice iirc?) recently, I would imagine that they’ve been compelled (whether they like it or not) to prioritize “solve the damn problem any way possible” over the usual tendencies towards “but only using carbon-emissions power plants” — especially seeing how rapidly their neighbor California solved their own woes with grid batteries years ago.
While the responsibility for the Texas grid failures, which led to multiple deaths and billions in damages, are diffuse across multiple people and organizations, if blame should be focused on one role it's the misleadingly named Railroad Commissioner who is primarily at fault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_Commission_of_Texas).
Despite the deaths, shutdown economy, massive destruction of property and suffering that the grid failures caused, the position has continued to be held by Republicans and they have not fixed the underlying issue of gas power plants that have to shut down in the cold.
If Texas gets another large ice storm, the grid will fail again, people will die again, and then 51% of the state will go vote for another Republican who won't fix anything and campaigned about preventing Sharia law (this is a real thing they run on in the primaries).
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