> No. Renewable energy capacity is often built out specifically for datacenters
Not fully accurate. Indeed there is renewable energy that is produced exclusively for the datacenter. But it is challenging to rely only on renewable energy (because it is intermittent and electricity is hard to store at scale so often you need to consume electricity when produced). So what happens in practice is that the electricity that does not come from dedicated renewable capacity is coming from the grid/network. What companies do is that they invest in renewable capacity in the network so that "the non renewable energy that they consume at time t (because not enough renewable energy available at that moment) is offsetted by someone else consuming renewable energy later". What I am saying here is not pure speculation, look at the link to meta website, they are saying themselves that this is what they are doing
Not fully accurate. Indeed there is renewable energy that is produced exclusively for the datacenter. But it is challenging to rely only on renewable energy (because it is intermittent and electricity is hard to store at scale so often you need to consume electricity when produced). So what happens in practice is that the electricity that does not come from dedicated renewable capacity is coming from the grid/network. What companies do is that they invest in renewable capacity in the network so that "the non renewable energy that they consume at time t (because not enough renewable energy available at that moment) is offsetted by someone else consuming renewable energy later". What I am saying here is not pure speculation, look at the link to meta website, they are saying themselves that this is what they are doing