In Texas, OpenAI's data centre runs on gas and the neighbours are breathing it in

According to Le Monde, which managed to film on site, OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, is building an enormous data centre in Texas, powered by gas turbines. The title of the video features the testimony of a man who watches the site go up next door. Here is what we know at this stage.

What we don't know: the exact power of the turbines, how much gas will be burned, the planned emissions, or whether any public subsidies are involved. Le Monde's summary doesn't say, and we won't fill those gaps with imagination. Yet these are the questions that matter. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the setting. We are sold artificial intelligence as weightless, light, almost spiritual. In reality it needs concrete, metal, water and power around the clock. And here, that power comes from burning a fossil fuel, on site, at the end of a resident's driveway. The cloud is a warehouse, and the warehouse has an exhaust pipe.

It is a fairly clear illustration of what Marxists call the metabolic rift. Marx described an imbalance between society and nature, deepened by an accumulation that exhausts soils and workers. Contemporary writers extend this to the climate: to grow without end, capital must push ever more energy and matter through its machine, and it passes the bill on to ecosystems and to the populations who have benefited least from the deal. Here the machine is digital, but the logic is the same: the cost does not appear on the company's balance sheet; it lands on the neighbour and in the atmosphere.

We will be told that gas is a transition solution, that the grid can't keep up, that the technology race waits for no one. Translation: the rush to market valuation comes before planning. Nobody voted for the next version of a chatbot to decide the energy mix of a Texan county. That choice was made in a boardroom, not in an assembly.

And the usual refrain is ready: "we are all responsible" for our digital consumption. No. A user who asks a robot a question did not choose the turbine. Emissions have owners, and they have company names. Asking everyone to tidy their inboxes while a gas plant goes up behind the fence is unintentional comedy.

The real question is one of control. Which energy, for which uses, decided by whom? Public planning could arbitrate between a hospital, a district heating network and the training of a model. The market, for its part, arbitrates in favour of whoever pays fastest. We are waiting for the site's full figures. We are already betting that residents will not have been consulted before the shareholders.