A friend recently sent me a news headline in which a company is promoting that they will use their servers 15 years. While this initially sounds like a great idea, once you think about it, for a little while, you realize modern servers are far more energy efficient than old ones. This got me thinking, when is the point where the energy efficiency of the modern server outweighs the embodied carbon of the new machine. The more I thought about this the more I went down the rabbit hole. What if, the servers are powered with solar. How do I account for this? What are the servers doing? If the server is doing a lot of vector calculations a new one with a H100 card might make sense. How are they cooled? A modern server will surely produce less heat for the same operation. So it really depends on so many factors in the specific case that a general statement is hard to make. But I still wanted to get some sort of feeling. So I broke it down to the following inputs for the new and old machine:
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