>>158771
you, at home, generating pictures on your desktop locally, is as bad for the environment as you playing a game on high settings

OpenAI or Microsoft or Google, with a fucking asston of machines just sitting idle waiting for load, is consuming absurd amounts of power doing nothing so they can meet peak demand (and then using quite a bit when active).
There is a reason why you might have heard about data centers looking into on-site nuclear energy.

The other big issue they need to deal with is cooling - the water returns to the water cycle because it's mostly lost from the data center due to evaporation, but this generally puts extreme pressure on whatever specific water source they're drawing from, causing problems locally.