I would argue we don't actually need data centers

data centres were kinda just a stand in for a concept: spare parts and redundancy are necessary… you need spare parts for pretty much any machine that can’t be offline for longer than it takes to get replacements parts. that’s as true for farm equipment and hospitals as it is for tech

and you have to have extras to meet peak demand: restaurants have extra pans, crockery and cutlery to cover a full house and then some extra for example

but data centres do also provide a lot of good:

connected software has made supply chains much more efficient which means less food waste, supporting the original premise

websites support not for profits immensely to reach people and automate self service… eg homeless people are actually reasonably likely to have access to a smart phone and free wifi, so it gives them a platform to access resources very efficiently

provisioning of disaster relief as well as early warning systems are now heavily reliant on servers in data centres

even modern agriculture has a lot of automation involved which relies on a lot of connected servers and databases running in data centres

a huge amount of that “for 30% of the work we currently do” is certainly reliant on data centres

and as much as they do take a lot of energy, they’re actually very efficient too: compared to a similar amount of processing power running on individual computers (if we somehow managed to replace all servers with peer to peer software) they likely use a lot less energy because energy use is actually a huge factor in server design, and chips get more energy efficient per FLOPS (or ghz) the larger they get

The argument isn't that it would be easy, it's that were the will there to do so, it is possible.

and my argument isn’t that it’s impossible, it’s that waste is both inherent and necessary. we try and reduce it, but some of that waste isn’t just dumb shit like throwing away product to keep value high: some waste and redundancy are his inherent to feeding and providing for a planet of 8bn people

heck i’ll bet you have at least 10x as many toilet rolls in your house than are on holders (in use) right now… and you wouldn’t likely buy them 1 at a time as you use them… that’s redundancy too: more of these exist in the world than are currently needed

and that the “30% of the hours” figure is similar: some jobs have busywork that could be cut down on, but sometimes busywork waste is also necessary because staffing also needs to be redundant, or over-provisioned to meet peak demand