It's a similar story with genAI and water, people just want it to be black-and-white, with big tech=evil. No, the water use is not big. Yes, the energy use is significantly larger than it would've been otherwise (and that's where it makes sense to focus!). And yes, it can be useful for some people.

the energy use is up in data centres and AI is part of it, but we're also just *using more cloud services* (source, the Uptime Institute) and the more people yell about the inaccurate figures (which appear to include hydropower under water use!) the less traction they get on real energy impact