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.