To an extent, yes, but companies are investing more into renewable sources of energy anyway, and you might even get a demand-side effect where the cost of supply of energy is incentivized to go down due to higher competition.
But I assume your friends are justifying this in more of an ideological way than you'd think, because there are lots of things that are more environmentally damaging than data centers, and even for data centers it's not like we haven't been using Google and Facebook for 20 years when the same concerns of energy would've been there.
What I've seen is people dressing up the Luddite argument of losing economics of living into a lot of other arguments like energy usage, when in reality I doubt they really give a shit about that over environmental degradation in other areas of their life.
But I assume your friends are justifying this in more of an ideological way than you'd think, because there are lots of things that are more environmentally damaging than data centers, and even for data centers it's not like we haven't been using Google and Facebook for 20 years when the same concerns of energy would've been there.
What I've seen is people dressing up the Luddite argument of losing economics of living into a lot of other arguments like energy usage, when in reality I doubt they really give a shit about that over environmental degradation in other areas of their life.