@RadicalAnthro there were warehouses filled with racks of servers and network gear before aws, microsoft and google got into hosting. While the number of servers has probably gone up, the cloud providers have not created a demand for their services, which would not be met elsewhere by a non-cloud provider. Datacenter hosting is not a term I encounter much these days, but I made my living working in that area for about 10y from the early 2000s, when the cloud was a little thing on architecture diagrams that showed where the internet connection was. Large companies had contracts with datacenter hosting providers. They owned or leased hardware. Then virtualisation came along, and all of a sudden the corporate clients didn’t need to own the hardware anymore. The cloud as we refer to it today is just an extension of that. So while it is now a bit more obvious how much energy goes into running ‘the cloud’ it’s mostly because what might have been discrete hosting contracts have been aggregated by big providers
kcarruthers