Data centres: AI is built on burned workers and breathless production rates

According to Reporterre, the French ecology news site, which reports on an investigation published on Friday 30 October by the Investigate Europe consortium, with eight partners in as many countries including the French daily Le Monde, several European data centre construction sites are marked by "dantesque" working conditions and abusive practices. The first case cited: in Belgium, in March, a 34-year-old Romanian worker was seriously burned during a test. The rest of the investigation is not detailed in the dispatch we have in front of us, so we do not know which companies are involved, the exact number of victims, or what legal action has followed. We will come back to this when the full text is available.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the investigation.

We are sold artificial intelligence as a cloud: light, immaterial, almost clean. But a cloud, in practice, is poured in concrete. It takes groundworkers, electricians, welders, people who test high-voltage installations on a Thursday morning. Behind the word "cloud" there are hard hats, boots and, here, a 34-year-old man in hospital. The image is stark: the promise of AI stands on scaffolding.

The race is the engine of the problem. When every digital giant wants its computing capacity before its neighbour, the timetable becomes sacred and workers' bodies become the variable being adjusted. Accelerated production rates, cascading subcontracting, a workforce from another European country, and therefore easier to move and harder to defend: this is the classic recipe of the building site. The fact that a Romanian worker was injured in Belgium is no minor detail. Cross-border posting fragments work collectives and dilutes responsibility. Who answers for the accident: the principal contractor, the subcontractor, the sub-subcontractor?

One might think this happens far from the home. But this work too has a domestic underside. An exhausted, injured or underpaid worker means a family absorbing the cost: a partner who provides care, children to look after, a budget to balance when the wage stops. What employers save on safety, households pay for in care and anxiety. This is the social cost that is taken out of the accounts so that they look good.

The old trade union lesson still holds. Unions fight over the price of labour, its hours and its conditions; that is necessary, even if it alone does not resolve the logic of the system (a conceptual note from La Gazette). But on these sites the stakes are more basic: the power to stop a machine, to refuse a dangerous test, to have a site inspected. That presupposes enough labour inspectors, shop stewards present all the way down the subcontracting chain, and principal contractors who are legally responsible.

Do the large companies in this sector have to account for how their infrastructure is built? We think so. As long as AI is measured in megawatts and never in fractures and burns, someone else is paying the bill.