Hyperscale: Confessions of a Mini Elon Musk

Hello, employees of our company. Today’s essay is about Paris Marx’s new book Hyperscale (scheduled for release on October 20, 2026).

White-collar workers like us—people who tap away at computers—have, without really noticing it, been on the winning side of capitalism all along. We’re obviously not billionaires, but there’s no question that electronic communication and programming have delivered a better ROI than what many less financially fortunate people get, including essential workers.

Put harshly: we’ve been sipping the cream off the top of society and pushing the unpleasant parts onto other people and other countries. In that sense, those of us who feel anger toward Big Tech billionaires are, you could say, in the same family as them. We are mini Elon Musk.

That said, problems like these economic arrangements are often chalked up to individual ability or lack of effort, and because the outcome is usually “well, that’s just how it is,” and because a relatively large number of people still come out ahead, this kind of structural problem has tended to be overlooked. Lately, though, as AI has advanced, issues like the extinction of humanity or job loss due to AI have started entering the conversation. That shift probably happens at the point where “more people lose than gain.”

In reality, however, there is harm that AI is already causing. Paris Marx points this out. Data centers.

Then there's a third category of people who are just inherently deceptive, and who are using this narrative to – as we were saying before – distract from the much bigger problems with generative AI that we're seeing at the moment.

If you can create this big, scary, fantastical scenario that captures people's attention, then maybe they're less likely to be talking about the impacts from the datacentres, how the chatbots are affecting the information environment, what they're doing to people's mental health and learning capabilities, and what this whole push is doing to the climate.

Interview: Paris Marx on why hyperscale datacentres pose greater threat than AI ‘science fiction’

Before my engineering career, I worked at a real estate fund. After the Lehman shock destroyed the property market, “data center construction” was one of the few utopias left. At the time, the momentum for large companies to move in-house IT infrastructure to clouds like AWS and GCP helped too. There were a lot of data center investment deals. The fund industry is ruled by ROI; it doesn’t think about the people who live in those towns. It’s shameless enough to believe that if you pay off local power brokers, the problem is solved. A gathering of people whose favorite hobby is licking banknotes and counting them. They might visit a site two or three times, but most investment decisions are made on paper. Japanese people in particular don’t voice their dissatisfaction even when they have it.

The same goes for the nuclear power plant that exploded in Fukushima fifteen years ago, and for the solar power projects that have caused pollution problems in recent years. People don’t mind imposing real harm on a minority in one region for money. I record here, once again, that I was one of them.

Back to data centers: I think a lot of people don’t know what the actual harm is, so here’s a brief introduction.

① Air conditioning and cooling fans run 24/7/365, so a low “buzz” never stops. If you’ve ever listened to a desktop PC that’s feeling unwell, that low hum—that’s it.

② The oppressive presence of a silver facility is visible at a glance. Compared with factories, they are overwhelmingly unmanned, so there is no “job creation” or “spillover for the local economy.” Rather, businesses and housing around data centers become taboo, and the town dies.

Where I live, noodle factories and agricultural machinery plants have gone up one after another recently. When I talk with parents at the elementary school, a lot of them work at those factories. That’s an example of employment and vitality for the region—and nobody directs any hate toward it. If a data center were planned for construction, I wouldn’t just lobby a city councilor I know; I’d grab a bamboo spear and charge in.

Rather than my crude resistance plan, Paris’s book apparently lays out successful opposition movements and alternatives when you look at the table of contents. When the 20th comes around, you should buy it. Engineers like me have also been on the side that imposed burdens through data centers in the past, so buying multiple copies is recommended as penance.