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An eye-opening account of how the data-center boom is pushing our planet past its breaking point

Underlying our seamless access to AI, cryptocurrency, and unlimited cloud storage is a hulking, costly physical infrastructure. Massive data centers full of energy-hungry chips and processors power everything we do online. Scrambling to meet dubious market demand, the tech giants have made our planet a bargaining chip in the next great race for a market monopoly.

In Hyperscale, journalist Paris Marx uncovers the excesses of hyperscale data processing. He exposes the deceptive, exploitative ways tech companies are siphoning energy and resources from vulnerable communities in their pursuit of digital power, abandoning the pretense of social responsibility.

Amid energy shortages and tech-induced battles over drinking water, Marx makes a powerful case for technology that promotes the social good over the bottom lines of tech billionaires. He joins the incredible efforts of people and social movements pushing back against the profit-driven interests of Big Tech, illuminating a path toward the sustainable future we all deserve.

The AI boom and its infrastructural demands have accelerated our many modern catastrophes. With razor-sharp reporting and incisive analysis, Marx shows us that the greatest threat is not the specter of AI overlords but a global environmental disaster already in the making.

A timely, vigorously researched and written work of tech and advocacy journalism.

— Kirkus

A polemical on-the-ground investigation into the rapid spread of data centres and their impact on the environment and the communities where Big Tech is building them … focusing on the people and places affected by their ambitious plans.

— Financial Times

If you want to understand where the future is heading, you have to read Paris Marx’s Hyperscale. Urgent and illuminating, this is a perfect primer for the key infrastructure of the 21st century.

— Brian Merchant, bestselling author of Blood in the Machine

Paris Marx has been years ahead of the rest of us when it comes to understanding the dark side of technology, and this book is no exception. Global in scope but personal in scale, deeply researched but paced like a thriller, this book turns one of the most pressing political, economic, and ecological issues of our time into a truly human story.

— Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won't Love You Back

An urgent, deeply reported examination of how the relentless expansion of data centers is reshaping communities, economies and the environment. … Timely and persuasive, this revelatory account is difficult to ignore.

— Publishers Weekly

An excellent, timely compendium of the history and layered social, environmental, and health impacts of data centers for anyone who seeks to understand the jaw-dropping numbers and real human-scale stories behind the headlines.

— Karen Hao, bestselling author of Empire of AI

Realistic and inspiring. While the book documents the harms of the broligarchy’s attempt to cover the entire planet with datacenters and create a world in which we can’t live without them, Marx also highlights movements building ‘human scale’ technology, helping us liberate our imagination from the singular path we’ve been sold by the AI industry.

— Timnit Gebru, executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute

About the author

Paris Marx is a journalist, host of the acclaimed podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, and author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. He lives in Newfoundland, Canada.

Follow Paris on Bluesky or visit his personal website.