So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large.

On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.