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The Data Center Argument Has the Wrong Target
The AI-environment debate has collapsed into a proxy war over data centers, letting the architectural choices that made them inevitable go unexamined.
The energy and water costs attached to AI infrastructure are generating real political friction — but the argument being made in public is aimed at the symptom most visible from the outside. Data centers are the object of scrutiny because they are physical, locatable, and measurable in ways that architectural decisions are not. What the conversation has not yet named is that centralized cloud computation was already the dominant infrastructure model before any AI product reached mass adoption, and the build-out now underway would be happening — at reduced but…