That doesn’t check out when considering model size. Unless that’s what you’re trying to say that self-hosted models force people to use smaller models. Just from an operations perspective a data center had economies of scale and the ability to batch up multiple independent user’s requests which should reduce the per token kWh along with the fact that your utilization will be higher vs somebody’s GPU at home would be idling.

That said I do believe there are negative environmental impacts from AI like always using giant frontier models for everything instead of smaller fine tuned models.

EDIT: I see a bunch of replies on the other comment, which all raise valid points, but that’s definitely not the way most readers are going to interpret the original post and moves the goal posts.