so that corporations can make a few easier dollars before this whole planet burns in flames?

Sure. But they do that by providing services. Services like Gmail and (probably for a large part) cloud hosting for other companies, companies whose services you’re probably using as well.

And honestly, it usually is more economical (Both financially as well as in eco footprint) for those companies to use cloud services that scale based on demand, rather than having a fixed set of servers running for the potential max capacity.

Don’t get me wrong, increased carbon emissions is bad, but the picture is a bit more nuanced than “Google flip switch, kill animals, get money”.

The AI hype (talk to your toaster!) will blow over, useful AI will remain and improve, this is just a hurdle along the way.