Paris Marx’s new book arrives at a moment that feels almost impossibly urgent. For years, Marx has been one of the sharpest critics of Big Tech, hosting the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us and writing with a mixture of skepticism, curiosity, and righteous frustration about the industry’s promises and failures. His new book, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires, is the culmination of that thinking, and it lands just as public opposition to data centers is reaching a fever pitch. Marx laughs when he talks about the timing, insisting that he couldn’t have predicted that everything would come to a head right as the book hit shelves. But there’s a sense in which the moment chose him. Data centers have moved from being invisible infrastructure to being political flashpoints, and Marx has been following the story long enough to know that the current controversies are only the latest chapter in a much longer history. His book is not just a warning about the size and greed of the tech industry, but also a deeply human story about communities, water, electricity, land, and the strange, often invisible ways our digital lives touch the physical world.
The explosion of interest in generative artificial intelligence, particularly after ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, has made the data center problem impossible to ignore. Marx had already noticed the warning signs years earlier. In the Netherlands and Singapore, governments imposed moratoriums on new data centers as far back as 2019, recognizing that these giant buildings were consuming too much electricity and straining local grids. Then there was Ireland, where the rapid growth of data centers started to dominate conversations about energy security. Marx watched as these trends accelerated, and the situation in The Dalles, Oregon, captured his attention in a particularly vivid way. Google had been operating data centers in that small community for years, but the company tried to keep its water usage figures secret, going as far as pressuring the city council to withhold the numbers from the public. For nearly a year, residents were kept in the dark, and when the figures finally came out, they learned that Google was using 29 percent of the water in the community. That kind of revelation turns abstract debates about Big Tech into something visceral and personal. Water is life, and seeing it swallowed by concrete buildings that host cat videos and cloud-storage accounts changes the calculus for everyone involved.
Marx’s book weaves these local stories into a global narrative about the tech industry’s pursuit of power and the resistance it has always generated. He takes readers on a tour that starts with antiwar protests targeting American computers during the Vietnam War, a reminder that the connection between computing and militarism is not new. The data center may look like a clean, futuristic building, but its lineage is tangled up with war, surveillance, and national security. From there, Marx moves through more recent battles in Ireland and Chile, where communities have pushed back against the arrival of massive facilities that promise jobs and development but often deliver noise, pollution, and pressure on scarce resources. These are not simply local disputes about zoning and permits. They are fundamental conflicts about who gets to decide how land and energy are used, and whether the benefits of digital life are shared fairly. The book also offers an alternative vision, set in New Zealand, where a different approach to data centers may be possible—one that centers public good rather than corporate profit. That glimpse of possibility keeps the book from being purely doom-laden, reminding readers that the current model is not inevitable.
The interview captures Marx in a reflective mood, looking back on years of reporting and forward to an uncertain future. When asked about the impact of data centers on American elections, he acknowledges that they have become one of those rare infrastructure issues that can sway voters. In less than two weeks, key midterm races could hinge on how candidates address the strain that data centers put on local communities, energy prices, and water supplies. That’s a remarkable shift for a subject that most people never thought about at all until recently. Marx’s tone is not triumphant; it’s more like concern mixed with a hint of validation. He has been sounding the alarm for years, and now the rest of the world is starting to catch up. But catching up means having hard conversations about what we’re willing to sacrifice for the sake of AI. These buildings do not exist in a vacuum. They have real consequences for real people, and as the interview makes clear, those consequences are landing hardest on communities that were never asked whether they wanted to host the physical infrastructure of the internet in the first place.
What humanizes the subject most is Marx’s willingness to sit with the contradictions. On one hand, data centers are absolutely necessary for the digital world we now take for granted. On the other hand, the way they are being built and operated reflects an enormous imbalance of power. Tech companies arrive in small towns with promises of economic revitalization, but they also bring demands for tax breaks, water, and electricity that can overwhelm local systems. Marx isn’t anti-technology, and he isn’t suggesting we all return to the pre-internet era. But he is asking a simple, uncomfortable question: What if the cost is too high? The book is full of people who have answered that question for themselves, standing in front of bulldozers, testifying at public hearings, and organizing their neighbors. Their stories are the heart of Hyperscale, and they are what will stay with readers long after the details about megawatts and water consumption start to blur together. This is a story about dignity, agency, and the right to say no—not to progress, but to a narrow vision of progress that treats human communities as obstacles to be overcome.
If the AI bubble pops, as Marx suggests it might, the implications are enormous. The data center building boom has been fueled by a kind of speculative fever, with companies racing to build infrastructure for a future that may or may not materialize. If that future turns out to be less profitable than hoped, all those giant buildings, all that concrete, and all that promised investment could become another kind of ghost town. But even if the bubble pops, the damage will have been done. Energy grids will have been strained, water tables will have been depleted, and communities will have been transformed, often irreversibly. Marx’s book is a powerful reminder that we don’t have to wait for the future to figure out whether this was a good trade. We are living through the consequences right now, in every community that has watched a data center appear on the horizon and wondered what it means for their children, their farms, and their future. By telling these stories with empathy and care, Hyperscale does something rare: it makes infrastructure feel personal. And in doing so, it challenges all of us to think about what kind of digital world we actually want to build—and who gets to make that decision.
