Data centers: AI discovers that electricity and water don't fall from the sky

According to Le Figaro, the Democratic wave in the United States' midterm elections threatens the expansion of data centers, infrastructure that has become central to the development of artificial intelligence. The paper describes an electoral revolt that opens the way to a series of local restrictions. Democratic candidates have promised to pause new projects, or even to stop them altogether. "Nous voulons un moratoire" ("We want a moratorium"), the paper's headline quotes.

What the dispatch does not tell us, however: which consumption figures, which specific sites, which measures will actually be voted through. We therefore know no more than that at this stage. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

It is nonetheless simple. AI is sold as a cloud, light, immaterial, almost spiritual. In reality, it is concrete, land, high-voltage lines and cooling systems. Cloud, yes, but with an electricity meter. And a water meter.

Marxists call this a metabolic rift. The idea: accumulation demands an ever-larger flow of energy and materials, and the cost of that flow is pushed onto ecosystems and onto the poorest populations, those who have benefited least from the deal. Marx wrote about soil exhausted by industrial agriculture. Replace the soil with the local power grid and the water table, and you get the same pattern, Silicon Valley version.

This is why the revolt is first local. The data center is an investment of extractive capital: profits flow upward to a few groups, while the nuisances stay on site. When a project absorbs electricity and water, it is local residents who risk seeing their bills or their living environment suffer. Developers promise jobs; the question is which jobs, and for how long. The dispatch gives us no figures on this.

Let us be precise, too, about the limits. A local moratorium does not change the logic. If you block one county, capital simply goes looking for the next one, with tax exemptions on offer. The risk is turning the contestation into a game of musical chairs between territories, in which the most vulnerable end up giving way. Another trap: a party that promises a pause today can negotiate "green growth" tomorrow. Campaign pledges have a long tradition of fragility.

The real question, then, is not "for or against AI". It is: who decides what gets built, for which uses, with what electricity? A data center used to optimise targeted advertising and another used for medical research are not equivalent. Only open, public planning that arbitrates between uses and resources makes it possible to ask that question. The market, for its part, always gives the same answer: more.

American voters may have just reminded us that matter exists. The task now is to turn that reminder into decision-making power, rather than a mere delay before the next expansion.