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Won't someone think of the poor billionaires!

? Didn’t the nuclear deal go through? What else was the point of the anti-radiation sickness meds?

So go spend $799million to help fix it.

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Checks Google, 1.87trillion, poor Microsoft.

Imagine what its costing consumers. We have to pay higher energy prices and price hikes from companies such as yours. The only difference is that companies will recover the costs from consumers.

thats what you get you pieces of SHITE

Who can just buy some solar panels.

Sounds like enough money to also permanently solve the problem too...

All it means is they’ll increase prices and charge their customers $1.6 billion more.

Microsoft's increased costs running their datacentres will be passed onto consumers of their services.

A larger percentage of businesses use Microsoft Azure.

A lot of reddit uses Xbox services.

It's bad news all round

Than they didn’t prepare good enough, it’s their own responsibility.

Oh no! Anyway...

Can cost

Wouldn’t it be “could cost”?

I'm pretty sure they're not releasing the news so you can feel sorry for them.

They can afford it. It's not like the fuckers pay their fair share of taxes.

Ignoring the post - but MSFT’s recent earnings are wild. Azure makes up >50% of their total revenue - MSFT is a cloud computing company now, with everything else (teams, windows, office, Xbox) are side bets.

I wonder if their insistence on grouping windows with Xbox is actually obfuscating how well theyre doing with gaming (laptop demand is struggling massively worldwide)

Yeah, but the strength of the US dollar …

Shall we open a GoFundMe?

800 million is not enough to solve climate change permanently, not even close

Who said anything about climate change? I'm talking about their energy shortfall. That's plenty to workshop a solution and begin implementing it in a profitable and effective manner.

Solving a problem isn't resolving the problem. It's figuring out how to resolve the problem.

I actually meant to write “the energy crisis” but my mind was in another post I guess, my bad, but I guess Microsoft could solve it’s own energy issues for 800 million, not the entire energy crisis but maybe the piece that affects them

We're in agreement then.

You’re right. Especially since “Everything else” is also running on their cloud, consuming cloud services, so not really side bets.

I mean congress could just fix that but why would either of the two right wing parties give a fuck?

Fix what, global energy markets?

Monopolies and artificial inflation. That is supposed to be their job after all.

It's a global energy crisis. Not a US one. And if they did split the company up economies of scale would dictate prices would increase not decrease.

Monopolies yes, inflation can only be fixed by QT and competition not Congress decree

Enormous amounts of time and money go into making datacenters more energy efficient, both in the design of computing equipment and in the physical design of heat control within them. If there was a solution that could fix energy issues for a measly 800 million , it would have been done years ago.

Unfortunately, due to the need to have datacenters around the world to service various regions (over 200 geographically separate datacenters just for Azure), there is no easy solution that's just going to resolve the issue.

I'm not talking about making the centers more efficient, I'm talking about getting into producing energy. Prices don't really go up or down if you're the producer. It's always just cost.

....Prices are up for Microsoft primarily because in Europe the input cost of gas and coal fired power stations is going up due to major increases in the cost of fuel, and the increased cost of generating power is getting passed on to the consumers. This is not something that changes just because you own the power station.

Real life isn't Simcity, you don't buy a power plant for 500k, slap it down, and get 200,000MW at a fixed cost indefinitely.

It absolutely does if you use solar, wind, geothermal or anything not so dependent on an oligarichal supply chain. If they make a coal or gas plant then they're idiots.

"Lets heavily invest in power sources that don't provide consistent power, so that we can power our datacenters that requires 100% power uptime with absolutely no downtime" is a bit of a ridiculous take.

They're not idiots, which unsurprisingly means that they're just continuing to buy power from existing power suppliers instead of dumping what would a decade of work and tens of billions of dollars of construction into getting a slightly better power rate in Europe.

There is no magic handwaving solution to energy prices that's going to take effect quickly, because if there were, people would already be doing them. There's no reason for Microsoft to get into the power business when any economically feasible plan can be done by another party. The slightly better power rate isn't worth the massive cost, financial risk, and regulatory exposure across multiple countries that would be required.

Batteries exist.

And there are many reasons why they are not used on a large scale.

looks at Australia

Disagree. There are several very large battery systems implemented now. The reason why there aren't a ton is because solar has only really been viable for a decade.

There's a very large difference between using batteries as an intermediate point and temporary storage point for input into the grid, and using them as a primary power source for datacenters, which are one of the most energy intensive operations around. The longer you need to store power, the less economically viable battery use is. Even if you had enough perfectly consistent (hah!) solar/wind generation nearby to power your facility, the battery levels required to keep the facility powered would be prohibitive.

I am a network engineer who works in both larger datacenters and smaller network closets/hubs, and even the battery backup required to keep a single crowded vertical network rack running for a few hours in the event of a power outage is hundreds of pounds and waist high. Scaling that out to large datacenter levels of power consumption and overnight capacity and you're talking completely absurd levels of expensive power storage capability.

And again, if there's a good location for a cheap and green new power installation, it's not really to Microsoft's benefit to get into the power business. It's 100% going to be cheaper for Microsoft to let someone else build and run a power plant that feeds into the general grid and just take advantage of the lower aggregate power cost.

Compared to what profit margin? GTFOH.

Those backups are just for emergency outages. Actual grid batteries are far more efficient.

Power companies routinely take advantage of customers. You're acting like they don't make money when they operate.

Oh no! Anyway