Who Owns the Energy Problem: AI or the Cloud?

The argument that cloud architecture — not AI — owns the energy problem is structurally clever and politically convenient. It shifts culpability from model developers to the telecoms-era decision to centralize computation, a decision made long before large language models existed. The Bluesky post that crystallized this position did not argue AI is clean — it argued the data center 'exists because of the architecture that refuses to let computation leave the cloud' ^[1]. For the people who find this persuasive, the environmental critique of AI is a misdiagnosis that…