Serfs for the Server Farms

Techno Feudalism is coming

On how the increasing digitalisation of life will mean fewer and fewer of us will work in real jobs doing tangible, physical ‘stuff’, and more and more of us will be economically redundant.

The UK new Labour government wants to turn Britain into ever more of a digital economy. That means more huge data centres to process all this digital information (or surveillance data).

Data processing already swallows up a large chunk of total energy used. Never mind turning down your heating and voluntarily freezing in winter to save the planet; if the much-hyped revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is really winging its way towards us, then your sacrifice will be negligible, a proverbial drop in the energy ocean.

That is because the energy demands for these data centres will be enormous. "In Europe, demand for data centers is expected to grow to approximately 35 gigawatts (GW) by 2030, up from 10 GW today [2024]."

"Sir Keir Starmer's plan to make the UK a 'world leader' in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could put already stretched supplies of drinking water under strain, industry sources have told the BBC. The giant data
centres needed to power AI can require large quantities of water to prevent them from overheating."

What this means in practice is an unknown impact on the supply of fresh potable water to people's homes, as well as to other non-computing businesses. No reliable estimates exist as yet, but even without exact figures, the water usage by data centres to keep the servers cooled is gigantic. One estimate (albeit based on an arid climate and not the notoriously soggy UK) at least gives some
indication of how much water would be diverted from human use (drinking, washing, agriculture, non-computer industry) to the servers:
"Dr Venkatesh Uddameri, a Texas-based expert in water resources management, says a typical data centre can use between 11 million and19 million litres of water per day, roughly the same as a town of 30,000 to 50,000 people."

When we bear in mind that a reliable supply of good quality drinking water is one of the main underlying factors in basic hygiene and more generally for public health, these projections underscore the immiseration of Britain's ordinary people to profit the tech billionaires.

And if the UK continues along the Net Zero path, there will not be enough reliable energy to run the servers, so something will have to give - and it won't be Big Data. Not just energy in the UK will be affected, but worldwide:

To give a flavour of the scale of data centre developments that are coming, it is helpful to look at recent announcements from large tech companies. Back in March, it was announced that Amazon had bought a 960MW data centre that is powered by an adjacent nuclear power station. In April, Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Meta that owns Facebook and Instagram said energy requirements may hold back the build out of AI data centres. He also talked about building data centres that would consume 1GW of power.

Last month, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison announced that Oracle was designing a data centre that would consume more than 1GW that would be powered by three small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Then Microsoft also got in on the act when it was announced it had done a deal with US utility Constellation to restart the 835MW Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 1 nuclear power plant to power its data centres. Anxious not to be left out, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google said they too were working on 1GW data centres and saw money being invested in SMRs.

Finally, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT has trumped them all by pitching the idea of 5GW data centres to the White House. Altman has been heard talking of building five to seven of these leviathans.

The demands for the energy to run these behemoths would outstrip what is currently being generated by western nations, never mind generating capacity once we have been forced to ‘go green[CR1] ’.

For example, as David Turver (quoted above) wrote: "The plans for ChatGPT alone would consume more electricity in a year than the UK, the sixth largest economy in the world, managed to generate. Now consider what the total demand is going to be when you add in the requirements of the likes of Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, Google and X."

The UK government proudly claimed at the end of October 2024 that at the International Investment Summit they had secured GBP 63 billion of investment for the UK, and nearly 38,000 jobs.

But what kind of investment? More than 38%, some GBP 24.3 billion, of this total investment derives from data centres. Real stuff like infrastructure (ports, airports, property and manufacturing) only attracted a measly 8.5% of the investment pot, and manufacturing itself (remember, Britain was once 'the workshop of the world') even less, namely 2.5% at GBP 1.55 billion. So, data centres and digital it is, according to our economic planners.

I’m not an economist, nor am I financially that literate, since I’m a recovering academic formerly specialising in history, but my take on this is twofold: energy and data centres both require very few actual flesh-and-blood people to run them, what with computing technology and now AI promising an ever jobless future.

Manufacturing was the last people-intensive sector of the different investment branches, especially if you think of the kind of very specialist manufacturing (like some engineering and aerospace stuff that appears to be the last bastion of British skilled labour), and that is a fraction of the 8.5% investment.

So, the overall picture seems to be fewer and fewer jobs for actual workers. With an absence of workers, and of people in general, there is less need for energy consumption at the domestic level (heating homes etc).

If the future is intended to be less peopled, then there is little need to upgrade the electricity grid. What energy we once consumed for our homes, mobility and leisure can be diverted to feed the data centres.

Maybe my imagination is running a little rampant today, but I fear a future scenario of a green and pleasant land, green because nearly devoid of people and pleasant for the few remaining, where we have achieved net zero by in effect becoming serfs for the servers.

---