Is it about the energy consumed by these data centres? I read a fightening statistic (if it was true) that the Irish Silicone valley accounts for something like 27% of the grid consumption, another similarly stupid figure for Bitcoin mining, I am very sceptical because if you add together the claimed figures for just a few activities like this they add up to several hundred percent.

I watched a French TV program about the changing planet, loads of drone views of different natural and man made landscapes worldwide, the dialogue was the same for all of them "XYZ is responsable for (choose your figure) percent of global CO2 emissions" I kept a mental note of the growing total and lost count at 350%

I had always thought that phone calls, internet communication had virtually zero unit cost, a few electrons or light travelling along fibre optique, the fixed cost, the infrastructure, the equipment at either end being very high but whether or not I type this I dont believe any more or less quuantifiable electricity is being consumed.

But seemingly the cost of keeping this data is very high which strikes me as ironic as my data is on my hard drive and I don't want to share it with anybody, but the data which these B-stewards are harvesting every time I visit a web site or take my phone with me when I go anywhere is seemingly very valuable and costing them loads of money to store.

More fool them I say but when we have power shortages everywhere should whatever percentage of the national grid be used to store what to me is stolen personal data?

Kim Kardashians ar5e must have caused a global brown-out then

Is it BS though?
My 1200W kettle boils water in under 2 minutes which would be 40W power over 5 minutes
I have been in a small company server room and it was mighty warm with full ventilation going on. The fans running would have consumed more than 40W power over 5 minutes but that does have to be divided across all of the users. I am not sure it is a black and brown as you suggest.

I note that some of the big server stations are set up in Iceland where the cost of hydrothermal power is cheap and the ambient temperature for cooling is low.

My 1200 watt kettle takes a lot longer than 2 minutes to boil even the minimum water quantity.

Say 0.7l, the capacity of my tiny kettle, temperature rise of 90° celcius at todays incoming water temperature.

4.18 joules to raise 1 gramme of water (= I Ml) through 1° Celcius

1 joule = 1 Newton Meter = 1 watt second

4.18 x 700 x 90 = 263340 joules

263340 divided by 120 seconds = 21945 watt seconds, close enough to 2.2kw, a kettle of that size with no heat losses to the casing or atmosphere could boil 0.7 litres of water in 2 minutes but a 1200 watt one could not.

Where do you get your 40 watts over 5 minutes from? That equates to 0.5 kwh and not 1.2kwh

I have found the article that I read.

www.bbc.com/news/business-64429819

Also the choice of phrase "A five minute Google search" is deliberately misleading, we may well spend 5 minutes or even hours going down Google rabbitholes but the search itself which we initiate takes milliseconds for the results to appear, there is no such thing as a 5 minute Google search.