Why are Tech Oligarchs So Obsessed with Energy and What Does That Mean for Democracy?

This piece is part of “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis,” in collaboration with Data & Society. Read more about the series here.

Just before he traveled to the Middle East to meet with the Saudi Crown Prince and to pursue a data center deal in the United Arab Emirates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was on Capitol Hill for a Senate hearing titled “Winning the AI Race: Strengthening US Capabilities in Computing and Innovation.” Altman, alongside executives from other tech firms, pushed the connection between AI infrastructure and energy infrastructure, and what he sees as the need for more of both:

Eventually the cost of intelligence, the cost of AI will converge to the cost of energy and it'll be how much you can have. The abundance of it will be limited by the abundance of energy. So in terms of long-term strategic investments for the US to make, I can't think of anything more important than energy, chips, and all the other infrastructure also. But energy is where this, I think this ends up.

Putting aside whether this supposed “convergence” makes sense, it’s clear that Altman sees a future defined by abundance. But there is a stark contrast between the energy-driven AI futures imagined by tech oligarchs and the ways in which AI-related infrastructures are already burdening communities near data centers, through their use of land, energy, and water, as well as their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. Tech oligarchs are seizing public lands to build data centers that propel the growth of powerful, energy-sucking forms of AI, allowing them to hoard resources and experiment with a new form of ultra-libertarian state-building called network cities —crypto-facilitated territories for so-called “innovation” that are created to exist outside of state regulation. Network cities play an essential role in creating the conditions for tech oligarchs to grab land, resources, and energy without public oversight.

The nuclear option

Nuclear energy has become a source of speculation—a future promise, much like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) itself, that allows for continued investments in infrastructure while slowing the transition away from fossil fuels in the here and now. Whether or not these AI projects ultimately fail, the hype around these technologies provides an excuse for tech oligarchs to further consolidate their power and threaten democracy, using AI to immiserate workers while further isolating themselves from the rest of humanity.

Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are both investors in nuclear reactor startups, such as Oklo, claiming that nuclear fusion—a technology that doesn’t yet exist in reality but has been a goal of nuclear scientists for 50 years—is right around the corner. In an interview with Bloomberg, Altman said simply, “Fusion’s gonna work.” Apart from fusion, small modular reactors (SMRs) can produce low-carbon electricity, but there are only a few working SMRs in existence, and the technology may not really be scalable. Oklo already signed an agreement with a data center operator, based on a nascent technology and the hype surrounding it, rather than on a technology that is fully operational. The nuclear power safety director at the Union of Concerned Scientists quipped, “These agreements do not appear to be the kinds of serious, substantial, and sustained financial commitments — on the order of many billions of dollars over decades — that would be necessary to fully realise these speculative nuclear projects.”

Altman recently stepped down from the board to free Oklo up for partnerships with OpenAI and other major AI companies. In an interview, Altman said, “I think our particular kind of fusion is such a beautiful approach that we should just race toward that and be done,” that is, he made clear that rather than focusing on climate goals and energy efficiency, the company would accelerate to its promised future using an energy source that does not yet exist. Altman went on to say that “I think AGI will probably get developed during this president’s term, and getting that right seems really important.” To translate: if the tech oligarchs are allowed to build without pesky environmental protections or safety regulations, then the AI rapture and energy abundance will surely come. A new executive order specifically targets nuclear safety regulation through the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Democracy, along with the environment, is collateral damage in the rush towards AI innovation.

Clearing the path

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy is opening up federal lands to data center development, identifying 16 different federal sites. Under Trump, the DOE is executing on one of Biden’s final and misguided executive orders and accelerating the government’s investment in AI and the energy infrastructures it depends on, all while removing as many regulatory barriers as possible, for example through a proposed AI regulation moratorium for the next decade in a blow to federalism and AI and data center transparency bills in states like California. The Trump administration is already trying to undermine California’s environmental laws in other contexts.

Turning federal lands into playgrounds for tech oligarchs is also part of the scheme to build a network city within San Francisco’s Presidio, a public park and a national landmark managed by the National Park Service, which is a frequent target of the second Trump administration. A recent executive order moved to effectively abolish the Presidio Trust. Why, you might ask?

Crypto enthusiasts are fantasizing about turning the Presidio into their own network city, separating it from the rest of San Francisco. Their AI-generated depictions of this imagined future dystopian site are strangely empty. There are no people—no workers, no users, and no city dwellers—in their vision of a right-wing San Francisco, where they control both public lands and local real estate. Sam Altman’s World project offers another dystopian future straight out of cyberpunk, hawking his eyeball-scanning crypto project Orb in a San Francisco storefront.

The juxtaposition of the real San Francisco and the fantasy of the network state provides a window into how tech oligarch development and construction projects ignore the real, material impacts of their delusions. They are doing this intentionally. Their fantasy relies on the consolidation of energy and AI infrastructure, and their ability to isolate places from history, regulation, and the needs of ordinary people—in other words, their ability to thwart democracy. Why are we allowing a handful of tech oligarchs to determine where the Earth’s resources and energy supplies are directed? On a quickly warming planet, why are we powering AI data centers instead of cooling people’s homes?

Moonshots in the dark

Some AI boosters talk about putting data centers on the moon so they can minimize the emissions and air quality issues that stem from Earth-based data centers. One company, Lonestar Data Holdings, which has customers including the State of Florida and the band Imagine Dragons for its solar-powered data center called Freedom, appears to be ignoring the rocket trips that will be needed for the construction and maintenance of the data center. A NOAA report found that a single rocket passenger is responsible for 100 times more pollution than a passenger on a plane.

Envisioning the moon as a barren space for data center construction projects mirrors the ways in which “empty” spaces on Earth, like deserts teeming with life, are often chosen for massive data center projects. Dryden Brown, the leader of Praxis, a project that envisions Greenland as an empty space where crypto proponents can create Mars on Earth, an entire network empire, is backed by Peter Thiel. There is a deep relationship between Bitcoin and other resource-intensive cryptocurrencies and petro-masculinity. Bitcoin is fundamentally connected to energy intensity, and despite some Bitcoin companies’ attempt to paint themselves with a green energy brush, Bitcoin, like AI, is perpetuating the fossil fuel industry as it drives the demand for energy. Peter Thiel hates Environmental, Social, and Governance, or ESG, regulation for this very reason. ESG has become politicized and is part of the tech oligarch push to remove DEI and climate initiatives from corporate governance.

Who gets left behind?

But the fantasy of the network city is built directly on the backs of already marginalized communities and workers. In Memphis, Black residents are experiencing negative health effects like asthma from the natural gas turbines used to power Grok’s data center, contributing to long-standing environmental racism in the area. To escape local control and oversight, Elon Musk has created a network city in the form of a small town surrounding the SpaceX rocket launch site in Texas called Starbase which is inhabited by SpaceX employees. Starbase residents are now being told they may lose their property to Musk’s development priorities.

Silicon Valley preppers and the architects of AI-addled technofascism aren’t denying the realities of climate change, but they are instead remaking society to save themselves while pushing for speculative energy futures where they fully control the earth’s resources. They are building themselves bunkers in preparation for the climate apocalypse and killer AI while creating company towns for everyone else. They’re investing in network states for unbridled energy infrastructures as two sides of the same coin, using techno-futures to undermine democracy and subject communities to environmental harms in the here and now. Their attempts to undermine state and local governance underline the power we still have on the local level to stop them.