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.
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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.
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[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.
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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.
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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.
From the article:
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