On Thu, 20 Aug 2026 at 17:47, Holger Levsen <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2026 at 04:32:07PM +0200, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > > I'm mostly in the same boat as you, in that my home AI system runs on > nice > > happy solar power in the summer (and on sunny days in winter, when the > heat > > pump is unable to supply my house with enough thermal energy, but that's > a > > different problem). The typical data center however is unlikely to shut > down > > at night, or when the days are shorter. > > and there are maaaaaybe 1 mio little datacenter like yours, while > 4 billion people use hyperscalers. > There are also lot of other, very much sustainable datacenters. Even the big players, like Google invest a lot in developing the green grid in the areas where their data centers are located - https://datacenters.google/operating-sustainably/ . Sure, they are not yet at 100%, but they are funding much more buildout of green energy and grid than they are consuming. Apple is at 100% green energy with its data centers and has been since 2014 and whole operations since 2018 (a bit easier with smaller compute and higher profit margins) - https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Progress_Report_2025.pdf. Meta is also at 100% green energy for their data centers, but a bit behind on water sustainability so far - https://datacenters.atmeta.com/sustainability/ . Microsoft is a bit behind, but also is spending massive amounts of money on sustainable energy with 2030 neutrality target. That covers most of the AI users, actually. Google Geminy has about 1 billion monthly active users, Google AI search about 2.5 billion. Meta has about 1.2 billion monthly users, unclear how many of them use AI features. Microsoft Copilot has about 0.4 billion monthly active users. Enterprice users are either included in the above numbers or are completely invisible as they are massively using in-house or hosted AI models. OpenAI, xAI/Grok and Anthropic are in the questionable to bad buckets. Beyond the 1 billion monthly users of ChatGPT that would be 0.2 billion for Grok and 0.3 billion for Anthropic as well as 0.2 for DeepSeek (which seems to be up to 10 times less resource-intensive to run as other similar models of the same generation). I don't find the basis to the claim that "4 billion people use hyperscalers". In fact, I find that the majority of AI users are using services from major, established companies with good to adequate environmental record. Their data center sustainability could very well be above what Debian is currently using. > this is like comparing a sling with the death star. yes, both are weapons, > and the sling is very green. go team sling! > > i also wish this thread to end but some claims here are ridiculous. You blame all AI for all of this. You claim in your proposal that "global LLM usage accelerates the destruction of our ecosystem" as if that was a fact. It is not. Your proposal also "condemns" this kind of use of AI - fully local, fully green and completely not contributing to climate change. Proposals A and C also ban even such AI usage. I would wager to say that 90%+ developers who would consider the question: "Does a fully local execution of an open weights AI model on local, already existing hardware, using surpluss locally generated solar power contribute to destroying the environment?" - would answer it in negative. Proposals that reject *even* such use of the AI and claim to do so on environmental reasons are ... well, misleading at best. I would warrant the guess that there is a general dislike or even grudge against techbros pushing AI and that the whole opposition to AI is just a symptom of that and that the reasoning behind that are just assembled to justify the already established opinion. Whatever the *actual* motivation behind it, I feel it would be counter-productive to steer the Debian project as a whole down this, extremely radicall path, especially when the argumentation behind that decision is just not holding up to any scrutiny. And by counter-productive I mean - it will squander any kind of opportunity for Debian to actually exert its influence to encourage environmentally and socially responsible AI development and usage. -- Best regards, Aigars Mahinovs
