So, requiring them to cover their datacenters with solar farms would lessen power requirements by 9% plus whatever offset to cooling costs, that’s not nothing as we try to find ways to power these things beyond private natural gas plants, which they can’t keep doing.

The 7.65GW datacenter Amazon wants to make, would need about 155,000 acres to have a 4x provisioned solar array if they wanted to operate it all day off solar based of the US’s largest solar farm. That doesnt account for land space for storage. Also a 4x over provision probably isnt truly enough for something like this to reliably operate off solar only.

Itd be great to make some solar though for daytime hours even if trying to store the ridiculous amount of power required is its own insane problem and not worth it.

Why are data centers in viable farmland? Put them in the desert