> One could also argue this is a temporary condition - driving the world to better, more efficient power-supplies in the long term (like nuclear).

This is a massive and dangerous assumption. Given that humanity could not have picked a worse time to double-down on ever increasing its emissions, we're going to need to do a lot better than "this massive increase in energy usage _could_ be temporary, despite all evidence to the contrary."

> It also allows engineers to more quickly arrive at efficient solutions for their problems - enabling more efficient systems being deployed earlier - possibly saving energy in the long run.

I'd have to be a _damn_ slow programmer for your average prompt session to be more energy efficient than my laptop running Vim.

I find the rest of your argument to be equally unconvincing, but you could have just stopped here, because no other points are remotely as important as AI's impact on climate change.