Forty thousand acres in a corner of landlocked Utah in the United States. A proposed data centre and power campus planned here is projected, at full scale, to require nine gigawatts of power — reportedly more than double Utah’s current average electricity demand.

Two thousand miles west, in Lake Tahoe, a utility company serving around 49,000 customers has been told it must find replacement supply by May 2027, after its Nevada-side supplier said it would no longer provide the same level of power service.

These are not unrelated stories. They are the same story, told twice.

For most people, “data centre” still sounds harmless. A warehouse where the internet lives. A giant refrigerator for emails, wedding videos and office PDFs. At the scale planned in Utah, that explanation collapses. Nobody needs nine gigawatts of power to store family photographs from Murree or quarterly reports from Karachi.

Something much larger is being built.

The old empires conquered land. The new one seeks something more intimate: your attention, your behaviour and, increasingly, your mind…

The old empires conquered land. The new one seeks something more intimate: your attention, your behaviour and, increasingly, your mind…

The polite term is artificial intelligence [AI] infrastructure. The more honest term is closer to this: a planetary prediction machine. Not a single machine in the Hollywood sense, with blinking lights and a villain’s voice. Something duller, more distributed and, for that reason, more frightening — a civilisational nervous system stitched together from chips, fibre, satellites, biometric scans, search logs, financial trails and the entire archive of recorded human behaviour.

The ambition is no longer to store what humanity has done. It is to predict what humanity will do next.

THE INTERIOR OF THE HUMAN BEING

This is where capitalism finds its new frontier.

Earlier frontiers required ships, armies, flags, missionaries, trading companies and maps. The old empires crossed oceans looking for land, spices, slaves and minerals.........

© Dawn (Magazines)