At least companies are behind it which can actually put the money were its needed and compensate it.
At least microsoft and google are on a co2 neutral race.
And all of these clusters doing something can also do research and partially do.
Its valid critisism, but we need to stop co2 production on a lot of other industries before we do that for datacenters. Datacenters save a lot more co2 (just think about not having to drive to a bank to do bank business).
My startup develops AI for the nuclear power industry to drive process, documentation, and regulatory efficiency. We like to say "AI needs nuclear and nuclear needs AI".
Big tech has finally realized/gone public that casually saying things like "we're building our next 1GW datacenter" is uhh, problematic[0].
For some time now there has been significant interest/activity in wiring up entire datacenters to nuclear reactors (existing Gen 2, SMRs, etc):
No thank you, I not going to let my beloved progressives be dragged into Luddism just so you can feel a little better about yourself through insignificant changes without a meaningful impact on the environment. Anything with true lasting effects will have to be top down like renewable resources/energy, EVs, viable alternatives to plastic, nuclear energy etc.
The argument should never be about reducing energy usage, rather it should be about how we generate that energy in a clean, renewable way.
I'd rather have those people work on climate change solutions