A single hyperscale data center can draw 500 megawatts continuously and evaporate millions of gallons of fresh water daily to cool rows of proprietary silicon. When tech conglomerates secure closed-door utility contracts, working households get saddled with spiked electric bills while utilities fire up mothballed gas plants just to satisfy the baseload surge.
The anger boiling over at local zoning boards is a rational response to an industry that takes far more than it gives. Giant corporations are staking claim to regional watersheds and thousands of acres of land, turning shared public resources into heat sinks for locked, proprietary platforms that strip user privacy and concentrate capital into fewer hands. Power grids are delaying clean energy transitions simply to support facilities that leave behind almost zero permanent local employment once the concrete dries.
High-performance computing remains a genuine scientific triumph, crucial for mapping climate physics and accelerating precision fermentation to feed humanity without raising and slaughtering animals that feel pain and fear. But computation cannot exist as an unaccountable private enclosure built on drought-stricken soil. Large-scale digital infrastructure must be treated as a public commons: held to strict ecological water budgets, run on dedicated clean power, and opened up for transparent, collective progress rather than billionaire wealth preservation.