Sucked In. The Gaping Maw That Feeds AI Mania

Data centers gobble vast capital, land, water and energy while forcing locals to endure ‘heat islands.’ Who voted for this?

By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee

“While technological successes are celebrated, the social fabric is progressively eroded, as if by a silent virus.” — Pope Leo XIV

The artificial intelligence industry likes to refer to its massive “hyperscale” data centres as “campuses.” That’s complete bullshit. A data centre hosts no students, no laughter and no libraries. The poet William Blake would have had a proper name for these ugly bunkers: “dark Satanic Mills.”

Into this mighty gyre now churns $3 trillion of global capital, much of it flowing from debt markets, private credit and government programs that uncritically regard the dangerously flawed technology as nothing short of miraculous, inevitable and necessary. That’s trillions of dollars not being spent to address the cost-of-living crisis or the storms of climate change.

AI’s capital intensity, largely directed by and for a secretive cartel of billionaires, also cultivates a job desert. According to one estimate, it takes a capital investment of $54 million to create one permanent job in the data centre industry while other sectors can create one full-time job with an investment of $322,000. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of jobs AI promises to make obsolete.

The gyre sucks up not only capital but immense supplies of energy. More than 11,000 data centres now occupy the planet, and half are located in the United States. A single 100-megawatt hyperscale facility requires enough electrical juice to light up 100,000 households. A larger proposed AI factory in New Zealand will draw 280 megawatts, or six per cent of that country’s electrical demand. And that facility’s electricity consumption will be dwarfed fivefold and more by behemoths slated for construction around the world.