> If the tech was lean at it's heart in terms of energy consumption, we wouldn't be seeing that or even the private nuclear reactor arms race by big tech.

Eh, I somewhat disagree with this. The US energy grid has had almost no extra capacity for a long time. A lot of this was due to efficiency (not a bad thing) and little industrial growth (not a great thing) in the country. Data centers themselves, I don't think are the biggest cause of the issues, but the distribution grid. We've had tons of problems around distribution with new energy sources coming online, but issues distributing the power to where we need to.

We see things like private power plants, not because we can't generate power, but because we absolutely suck at distribution of power.