The current wave of videos and articles about data centers, as well as my critical response here, all reside somewhere.
To be precise, they reside in a data center. So do all the movies you pick from Netflix to watch in the evening.
Nearly everything digital that is not on your own or someone else’s CD, hard drive, or USB stick physically resides on servers and drives in data centers.
The notion that they reside “in the cloud” is only a metaphor. Their location is very much on the ground, in buildings filled with humming machines, cooling systems, and the physical infrastructure of the information revolution that began more than 50 years ago.
We see the current rapid expansion of these sites because the information revolution has not slowed-it has accelerated. And there will be no stopping it. We can shape the environmental and energy impacts of such centers, and we certainly should, just as we have regulated highways, railroads, and air travel over the past century. But we are not going to stop storing data any more than we are going to stop traffic, nor should we want to.
The deeper reason is this: there will be no new socialist order of ecologically sound abundance-no society where the working day shrinks toward zero, and the amount of living labor in each commodity approaches zero-without the continued expansion of computational capacity.
That transitional order, the one Marx described in The Fragment on the Machine in the Grundrisse, depends on the rising organic composition of capital, on the displacement of direct labor by scientific knowledge, automation, and machine systems. It is precisely this process that makes a classless society possible, where all classes-including the working class-wither away. As Marx noted, that is when human history truly begins.
Our capitalists, naturally, have other ends in mind for the ongoing information revolution. They see data centers as profit engines, not as stepping stones toward a post-scarcity civilization. So we will fight it out-our way and theirs.
But if we simply try to stop the expansion of data centers, we will fail. Worse, we will fail at any kind of ecologically sound future, because it is precisely AI and its embedded know-how located in these centers that will enable us to design, model, and deploy such a friendly eco-future.
This is not simply a theoretical point. China, for example, has made the growth of its AI and high technology sector a national priority, pouring resources into data centers, semiconductor fabrication, and machine learning infrastructure. Whatever one thinks of Beijing’s political system, it has grasped a basic truth: the societies that master advanced computation will shape the ecological, economic, and geopolitical landscape of the rest of the 21st century. No country can credibly claim that slowing or blocking data center expansion is a viable path when other major powers are accelerating.
But acknowledging the necessity of data centers does not mean giving them a free pass. Quite the opposite. Their ecological footprint-energy consumption, water use, land use, and carbon emissions-must be regulated with the same seriousness we apply to transportation, utilities, and heavy industry.
This is where the proposals of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez matter. They have called for a regulatory framework that treats data center expansion not as a private corporate prerogative but as a public interest question. Their proposals include:
- Strict environmental impact assessments before new data centers are approved, including binding limits on water usage and carbon emissions.
- Requirements that data centers run on verifiable renewable energy, not on fossil fuel offsets or corporate greenwashing.
- Community benefit agreements ensuring that local residents do not bear the costs-higher electricity prices, water shortages, or degraded air quality-while corporations reap the profits.
- Public transparency mandates, so that companies disclose their energy consumption, cooling methods, and environmental impacts rather than hiding them behind trade secret claims.
- Federal investment in green grid infrastructure, ensuring that data center growth does not destabilize regional power systems or cannibalize public resources.
These measures, wisely employed, do not hinder technological progress; they civilize it. They ensure that the infrastructure of the information revolution is built on democratic terms, not corporate ones.
The choice is not between data centers and the planet. The choice is between regulated, ecologically rational data centers and unregulated, profit driven ones. Between using AI to design a sustainable future and allowing it to accelerate extraction and inequality. Between a world where the information revolution is harnessed for human emancipation and one where it is bent toward surveillance, monopoly profits, and authoritarian control.
We cannot stop the machines. Nor should we. But we can decide what they are for, who they serve, and under what ecological limits they operate. That is the real terrain of struggle. And it is one we cannot afford to abandon.
