Artificial Intelligence—Coming to a City or a Desert Near You, Destroying the Planetary Economy and Environment

The current fetish for artificial intelligence awaits the habitual fate of new transportation/communications technologies: wild over-investment in a financial bubble, sudden collapse, and eventual utility—consider the history of the bicycle, railway, radio, or internet. But unlike those technologies, whose ecological significance took decades to emerge, debates over artificial intelligence’s environmental impact are already underway, because construction of the data centers on which it depends has disclosed astounding needs for water and power. This article investigates the socioenvironmental impact of those centers in the shadow of political economy, drawing on global data and examples from the United States, Britain, Spain, and México. We chart the material expansion of data centers fueled by speculative overproduction and corporate and governmental public relations, as well as AI’s underlying model of inter- and intra-national inequality and labor exploitation, followed by a discussion of the technology’s ecological perils and resistance to it. The paper concludes by calling on scholars to collaborate in that resistance, especially through the participatory design of regulatory public policies.