I do suspect the Doubt, Deny, Delay crowd like AI for being disruptive to existing trends in energy that appear to favour renewables. In jurisdictions where they are dominant they can make NOT renewables a requirement for government support for AI data centres. That means fossil fuels, possibly with commitment to nuclear at some unknown future date - ie it means fossil fuels. (I think nuclear is seen as so unlikely to ever rival fossil fuels on costs that fossil fuel companies do not fear it - and it remains politically useful as a raised finger to environmentalists and most climate activists.)

I’m not convinced data centres can be successfully decoupled from the factors that have been making RE the dominant new energy - cost, speed of build, versatility, convenience. And did I mention cost?

And somewhere in corporate thinking must be the nagging conviction that global warming and commitments to zero emissions and, worst of all, potential for liability will keep simmering away and cannot be fully suppressed. They don’t want it to come back around to bite them.