Hyperscale

This is a remarkable book for our age—and a reminder that data centers have been taking up acres of land and humming along since the birth of the Internet. The difference is the scale of the disaster in the age of generative AI, and the hunger for more land, more quick energy from fossil fuels, more compute. I'm now a little less naive thanks to Paris Marx, and not necessarily in the ways you would think. Marx gives the reader context (and a clear vision of the existentially bizarre scope of "hyperscale" data center projects), what tech giants want with all of our drinking water, and just how long this all has been going on (longer than you think). Comparable to works by Cory Doctorow, Marx does not present an anti-tech future, but is keenly aware how the AI boom is and will result in extraordinary infrastructural demands that already have companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google tossing their climate targets into the wastebasket in an endless race to the bottom for more compute.