Paris Marx’s new book couldn’t have landed at a better time. The longtime critic of Big Tech and host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast has been thinking about data centers for years, and Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires comes out right as opposition hits a fever pitch.
“I certainly didn't predict that it was all going to kind of come to a head as my book was coming out,” he says with a laugh.
While data centers are playing a role in shaping US elections—they’re one of the issues that could decide key midterm races in less than two weeks—there’s a history of struggle around the world. Marx’s book takes the reader on a tour of the tech industry’s quest for power and its opposition, from antiwar protests targeting American computers during the Vietnam War, to more recent resistance in Ireland and Chile, and an alternative vision for the future of data centers in New Zealand.
I caught up with him this week to talk about what he’s seen, and what could happen if the AI bubble pops.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
MOLLY TAFT: When did you decide to write a book about data centers?
PARIS MARX: In the Netherlands and Singapore, they had moratoriums going back to 2019. But in 2022, there was a growing recognition of the demands of data centers in Ireland, on the energy grid in particular. There were huge quantities of electricity that data centers were starting to consume over there.
The other story that really got on my radar was what happened with Google in The Dalles, Oregon. Google was really trying to hide its water use figures, to the degree that it got the city council to try to keep its water use figures secret. They kept that going for the better part of a year before the community finally got the actual numbers and found out that Google was using 29 percent of the water in the community.
ChatGPT came out at the end of 2022. It became apparent that there's going to need to be a lot more data centers for generative AI. These places were already feeling the effects of significant data center construction, and it felt like that was going to start coming to a lot more communities very soon.
I feel like a lot of Americans think data centers just came out of the blue in the US over the past year or two, just in time to be this huge midterms issue. One thing I like about your book is that it shows us how other countries and communities served as early warning signs.
Ireland was a real example of what can happen. Dublin had a moratorium passed back in 2021. It was actually the grid operator that said, “Hey, there are too many data centers. We do not have the grid capacity to connect any more of them.”
In response to that, you had the industry moving to make sure it can still build data centers in Ireland. They can't get grid connections in Dublin, so they start looking at building in other parts of Ireland. They also looked at starting to tap into the gas network so they can use generators. Eventually, they start building dedicated gas power plants to power their data centers instead of connecting to the grid.
The Irish energy grid is a public grid—only the public utility can build electricity lines. And data center companies actually lobbied for legislation that essentially allows private companies to build electricity cables. That obviously concerns a lot of people and presents questions about equity in the system.
The gas stuff looks so prescient with what’s happening in the US now, where companies are racing to build these massive private gas power plants for data centers.
[Data center operators] were getting these emission licenses from the Irish Environmental Protection Agency to be able to burn all these fossil fuels. The agency was warning that climate targets are going to be a lot harder to achieve now.
When I started to see that happen in the US, I wasn’t surprised. I’d already seen the story play out before. But the scale of it is staggering, and how quickly it’s escalated.
What happens to the physical infrastructure—from the gas plants to the data centers themselves—that's getting built out if this industry falls apart? Is there historic precedent for that?
I think we're in an AI bubble. But what does the collapse of that bubble look like? They're planning to add all these data centers and all of these gas power plants in order to power the data centers. But there are issues with getting turbines, with getting chips, with getting different kinds of pieces of the puzzle for the data center itself. Are these even going to get built out before there’s a reassessment of the demand for AI?
We often talk about the excess build-out of fiber capacity back in the dotcom boom and bust. But there was also a build-out of data centers—obviously a much earlier stage than what we're at now. A lot of data center companies went under. Companies like Equinix, which did survive, bought up a ton of data centers to be ready for when that capacity returned.
But the issue we have now is that if data centers are being planned for AI use, and we’re operating under the assumption that the chips are going to have to be cycled out within a few years. Even if the data center is there, what makes it most valuable is potentially not going to be useful by the time that demand returns.
Inevitably, even if the data centers don't come, then those gas plants will exist. They will be looking for new customers to justify their existence. I'm sure that people are not building them with the intention to just shut them down.
You ended the book with a specific example in New Zealand of a community-led effort to create a more accurate speech-recognition model of the Māori language, using local cloud providers to host the data. I really liked this alternative vision of a non-extractive way to harness the powers of AI. Have you thought about what we could do to make some changes and how this build-out is going?
I would like to see governments go really hard on actually putting firmer regulations on the development of data centers. But those should also be paired with regulations on the AI products themselves. We had a lot of promises about what generative AI was going to deliver that haven't been realized. There has also been a long list of harms that have arisen from these technologies that we were not told would come along with them. Our governments do not seem to be so willing to actually take that on. They're buying the narrative that generative AI is still what Sam Altman sold it to be in early 2023 rather than what it has become today.
I think that we do need to be thinking of how we do technology differently, especially in this moment where we're dedicating so many resources to the infrastructure to enable generative AI. We should be asking, how much computation do we really need? How many resources are actually justifiable to put into this project? What are we actually getting out of it, right? Does what we're getting from what Silicon Valley is creating really justify the resources that we are collectively sacrificing in order to realize it? If we actually did the assessment, I think that we would very clearly find that there's no way to justify what we are doing right now—from a financial perspective, but also from a social and environmental one.
What We’re Writing
Speaking of those climate targets, it’s not just the Irish government that’s thinking about them. My colleague Joel Khalil covers how the European Union’s thirst for AI is running into European countries’ climate goals. Joel tells me he wouldn’t be surprised if data centers become a political flash point in Europe, like they are in the US, as countries go to the polls next year. “The fascinating thing about the European data center build-out is the collision of competing interests: national-level policy butts up against local priorities, ambitions for economic growth stand in conflict with climate objectives, and planning bureaucracy foils attempts by AI companies to rapidly expand their fleets,” he says. “It’s hard to see how Europe could possibly have it all.”
What We’re Reading
- The New York Times covers how the AI and data center boom is boosting a surprising commodity: gray paint.
- The massive build-out of data centers in Texas threatens years of progress in the state cutting air pollution. The Texas Tribune has more.
- Google has apologized for clearing more than 800 acres of forest in Finland without getting the necessary environmental permits to build part of a €13 million data center project. The Guardian reports that the tech giant is facing backlash in the country that could bleed into elections next spring.
