Paving the world over with data centers is an obsession that goes beyond the mere lust for profit — it grows into an antagonism toward the slow and imperfect evolution of humankind
Gods used to be summoned with fasting, fire, and sacrifice. Our contemporary high priests — because civilization apparently is progressing somewhere after all — have discovered a more refined liturgy: windowless halls, cooling systems, and electricity bills spoken of as if they were destiny. The temple is no longer on a hill. The temple is on cheap land, next to a substation, close to water.
Those who say they want to save the world shouldn’t be trusted blindly, because they might be more drawn by the desire to destroy it, or may have already written it off. This is an antagonism toward slow, often imperfect human evolution, which is no longer allowed to continue on its “peaceful course.” Standing opposite it are technological obsessions with creating a God out of a machine, to which a ruined planet would be handed over as some kind of birthday present.
It’s not just a new industry being built. A new metaphysical order is also being built, in which humans are gradually talked into experiencing their own thinking as an outdated work habit. Although… if we’re honest, wasn’t that somehow the goal all along?
Thinking, yes — provided it’s productive, within set limits, never “with one’s own head.” Those who did have the ambition to think for themselves were punished throughout history, and today that “threat” will be suppressed even further. Someone, or something, will think in our place.
Naomi Klein, the Canadian author and professor at the University of British Columbia known for her writing on capitalism and ecology, captured this formulation with rare precision. The idea that thinking can be handed over to a machine, she says, is not just a technological dream, but a fascist impulse.
Of course, a chatbot is no new Mussolini with a better interface. What she’s actually arguing is that fascism always begins where a person is separated from judgment. Responsibility is then delegated. Doubt is declared a nuisance. Collective thinking — the slow, laborious kind — is replaced by a command arriving from the system. Klein therefore describes the broader AI race as a model that constantly demands more and more computing power — through a tripod of tech companies, fossil fuels, and the state, whose ultimate myth is a world blanketed in data centers in an attempt to summon a “digital god.”
Of course, that god is, for now, quite modest. It hallucinates, invents things, and rarely — or only with great difficulty — admits it doesn’t know something. In other words, it’s a superbeing still in a rather infantile stage.
But religions don’t live off the present — they live off promises. Today’s applications that produce “slop” aren’t important because they’re the final form. They serve as a “sacrament of future intelligence.” The new believer isn’t shown “God.” He’s shown a sign that God might be coming, provided a large enough power plant is built for him.
And power plants, in this story, are becoming less and less of a metaphor. The International Energy Agency estimates that global investment in data centers has nearly doubled since 2022, reaching around half a trillion dollars in 2024. That year, data centers consumed around 415 terawatt-hours of electricity, and by 2030 that consumption could more than double, to around 945 terawatt-hours — somewhat more than Japan’s entire current electricity consumption(!). In the US, according to the same report, data centers account for nearly half of the expected growth in electricity demand by the end of the decade.
When residents complain, they get the old disarming phrase — don’t protest, this is progress. The same sentence once defended a factory poisoning a river.
AI in this form, as Klein observes, becomes a rescue package for the fossil economy right at the moment it began losing its historical certainty.
The state is the third leg of that tripod. Take the American AI Action Plan from 2025 — it recommends making federal lands available for data centers and the power plants that feed them, along with speeding up environmental permitting and shortening regulatory procedures. Translated, local democracy becomes an administrative nuisance, and the energy hunger of private companies gets labeled a national destiny.
Here we see why outsourcing thinking is more than a comfortable habit. It creates a political subject who no longer asks what the technology is for. It only asks whether its rollout is running late — and if companies can’t find enough buyers for everything they’ve built, there are always governments, universities, and public services, afraid of looking provincial.
A preliminary MIT NANDA report from 2025 claims that, despite $30 to $40 billion in corporate investment in generative AI, as many as 95% of organizations in their sample see no measurable return on investment(!), while most projects remain without any clear effect on the profit-and-loss statement. But panic has its own economy here. No one wants to be the last person who thought with their own head. That seems dangerous.
And when Earth becomes too small, the industry’s imagination doesn’t become more modest. It becomes orbital. In 2025, Google unveiled Project Suncatcher, a research “moonshot” (a term for an extremely ambitious idea) envisioning satellite constellations with solar-powered TPU processors and optical links for scaling machine learning in space.
That’s the picture of our moment. Instead of asking ourselves how much computing we actually need, we ask whether computing can be relocated off the planet.
Jorge Luis Borges, the famous Argentine writer, once imagined an empire that made a map so precise it ended up being exactly as large as the empire itself. The map thereby became meaningless, because it no longer helped understand the world — it merely duplicated it. Something similar is now happening with technological fantasy — a machine is being built that is supposed to interpret reality, but for that it demands more and more of reality itself, more and more energy, space, water, and political obedience. It seems we’ve decided to build a computer exactly as large as the despair that produced it.
The darkest mission isn’t just to destroy the world for profit. Profit is here an almost banal category, since states will pour in all the money needed. The deeper ambition is to prove that the world can be turned into “input.” Climate, labor, language, art, local community, the river, the night sky — all of it becomes raw material for a system that promises that one day it might think like God. If the end must come anyway, some would apparently rather greet it as a technical achievement, as a demo version of divinity.
Aside from very convinced believers, humankind is, in principle, not sure whether God created it. Now we have a new category — the human who thinks he will create God, who will reverse the very dogma itself. But why? What’s it all for? It’s obvious that man-the-creator doesn’t much like man-the-created — and by the same token, doesn’t much like himself either.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
