Don't sacrifice the real world for AI
Data centers, billionaires, and the economic model we live in
St. Louis is considering a temporary ban on data centers, and multiple projects in the area have been canceled or postponed. Indianapolis recently shut down a Google data center after community pushback. Tucson’s city council rejected a new data center unanimously. Resistance to these projects is coalescing and growing and spreading across the United States. Tech companies like Amazon and Google and Meta aren’t taking this lying down, but popular sentiment is rising against these massive, wasteful, dystopian behemoths that are emblematic of everything wrong with Silicon Valley and, really, our world.
A data center is a building or group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, like telecommunications and storage systems. Big Tech wants to exponentially increase the construction of these facilities, primarily because AI requires massive computing power. So they’re proposing projects that are typically hundreds of acres in size, with some data center “campuses” running into the thousands of acres.
The Silicon Valley pitch is that these centers create jobs and help the local economy. And they do create a number of short-term construction jobs. Electricians, plumbers, and builders all help put up these projects. But then, once construction is complete, there are remarkably few long term projects. The nearly 500-acre Google data center that community organizing recently shut down in Indianapolis would’ve created just 50 long-term jobs.
And then there’s the negative effects. These projects use millions of gallons of water. Many data centers rely on water-intensive cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of drinking water each year. There is also of course the vast swathes of land that are consumed by these projects, land that could be used for any number of things becomes just a home for servers. Lastly, and perhaps more significantly, is the energy usage.
Recent information about the energy consumption of some of these data centers is staggering. Sam Altman of OpenAI just announced a new plan to build 10 gigawatts of AI infrastructure. That’s as much energy as 10 nuclear reactors, or about what all of New York City uses in a year. A new data center in Wyoming will use more power than every home in the state combined. And these are just some of the many projects being built and planned to meet the AI boom.
The downstream effects are clear. Power prices are skyrocketing. Electricity rates are going up more than twice as fast as inflation. The average residential electric bill is already 32% higher than it was five years ago. In data center hot spots, areas that have become hubs of data center construction, it’s even worse, with electricity now costing as much as 267% more than it did five years ago. That’s both because these Silicon Valley projects consume tons of electricity, and because they’re extremely wasteful. As a Times investigation found: “Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90% or more of the electricity they pull off the grid.”
So it’s no surprise that communities are rallying against the construction of data centers in their backyards. But it’s an uphill fight. In Memphis, Elon Musk’s AI company is polluting the city, in other cases people complain about the constant noise emitted by these centers, and Big Tech doesn’t care at all about the externalities of these projects. They rush permits, try to keep the extent of their plans secret, and throw money around to steamroll opposition. But people keep fighting. Data centers have become a magnet, a physical project to rally around, a concrete site to fight Big Tech’s dystopian vision for our world.
Data centers also have their supporters, of course. Beyond just Silicon Valley, numerous investors are eager to see the value of the biggest tech companies go up and up and up. More than a desire to see a good product, more than the desire to see Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos create something useful, these folks want to see stock prices rise eternally. Right now just seven tech companies, known as the Magnificent 7, make up over a third of the value on the S&P 500. Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and Alphabet (Google) have a combined market cap of nearly $20 trillion. Ten years ago that number was $2 trillion:
It’s worth sitting with these numbers for a moment. $20 trillion is more than the GDP of China. It’s more than the GDP of every country on Earth, with the exception of the US. And these companies are holding up the US economy in a very real way. Total AI spending, largely on data centers, has contributed more to the growth of the US economy this year than all of consumer spending combined, and many even in the business world are now warning that this is unsustainable. Not unsustainable just because of its environmental impact, to be clear, but also because this strange economic scenario where trillions are spent without receiving much profit in return just cannot continue indefinitely.
The environmental impact is also unsustainable, of course. Converting land and water and massive amounts of power into computing is not something that can continue forever. We need the land, we need the water, and we don’t need AI slop. This brings us to the crux of the problem, brings us to two competing visions of the world — a competition whose stakes couldn’t possibly be higher.
On the one hand you have people who measure the success of a society by whether or not certain numbers go up. Does the stock market rise? Does GDP increase and increase? That, for one camp, is enough. Economic metrics rising is sufficient evidence of success. Investing trillions in AI, then, is purely good. It makes the economic picture appear rosy, even if there’s something slightly off about AI spending propping up the entire economy.
The other camp would look a little closer. People who believe that there’s more to assessing society than a few numbers going up might look at trillions of dollars being poured into a technology whose benefits remain dubious, at best. You might look at something Mark Zuckerberg said the other day, for example, and start asking questions. On one of his many podcast appearances Zuckerberg was asked about spending hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure, and if the AI bubble means that might be a mistake. He replied: “If we end up misspending a couple of hundred billion dollars, I think that that is going to be very unfortunate, obviously. But what I’d say is I actually think the risk is higher on the other side.”
Unfortunate. Hundreds of billions of dollars. Enough to eradicate homelessness and hunger and two or three other problems in this country. Down the drain because a pathological billionaire sees more risk in missing out on this AI race. We’ve reached a terminal stage of “the economy” being an agglomeration of numbers that are so disconnected from the real human experience that they risk being utterly meaningless. Prices going up, homelessness rising to record heights, the job market being increasingly difficult — the dominant model registers the AI bubble as being exponentially more important and indicative of the economic picture than the widespread difficulties plaguing hundreds of millions of people.
One giant tech company hands another a hundred billion dollars, which the second company will spend primarily by handing it back to the first company, and our economic measurements register that as a massive amount of economic activity. This is exactly what Nvidia just did with OpenAI. The chip company handed the AI company a hundred billion, to spend on chips. And that registers as an economic boom. Meanwhile, people living next to data centers struggle to find jobs, see their electric rates skyrocket, worry about their water quality, and their concerns hardly factor into the dominant economic outlook.
Late capitalist society is deeply disconnected from reality. We know this. We know we’re disconnected from the food we eat, from the cycles of the natural world, from the land beneath our feet. And our way of understanding the economy lies at the heart of this disconnect. Trashing the planet is written off as an externality, companies profiting from raising rents or jacking up the cost of health insurance is seen as an economic good, CEOs are rewarded for conducting mass firings. The whole economic outlook is fundamentally disconnected from what’s actually healthy and good for people and the planet.
Data centers are just one symptom of an insidious system. They epitomize the way we’re told to sacrifice land and water and the fundamentals of life for the profits of the super-rich. They’re one of the countless ways capitalism sacrifices the real world to make economic numbers go up. And this model has failed us. The top 10% now hold 67.4% of all the wealth in the US, while the bottom 50% hold just 2.5%. And that doesn’t even account for the rampant exploitation around the world that’s filled the pockets of these billionaires in America.
It’s time for a radical change in how we understand what’s important, what’s beneficial, what matters. The very real world, the vital ecosystems that sustain life, clean water and fresh air — these are the most important factors needed for a decent future. The economic assessment we need doesn’t prioritize stock market numbers over life itself. We need an economy where nature and health and the necessities of life aren’t externalities that can be sacrificed, but are instead the key factors we’re measuring. In a livable future, economic health will not be disconnected from the health of people and the planet; our understanding of the economy will be intimately connected to the vital components that sustain life. Capitalism and its philosophy of endless growth at all costs can’t give us the future we need. It will take another system, one that puts life over ever increasing profits, to allow us to survive what lies ahead. - JP
Absolute banger, chief — keep up the great work
Yes! 🙌🏼