The idea of is that moving work from a a region with fossil fuel generation to one with renewables will reduce emissions.
This is of course correct. But it depends a lot on
- how much work you can move
- how much of the time you can move it
- what the difference in carbon intensity is between the high-CO2 and low-CO2 region
- what the contribution of the embodied carbon of the data centre is.
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When you take all those factors into account, it turns out the gain is so small that investing effort into this is purely a distraction from the bigger problem of the growth in data centre capacity.
(The paper I'm working on now tries to quantifies what that growth means in terms of global emissions. )
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