I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that people all over the world are turning against data centers.

Residents of Great Torrington in England are trying to stop one of Europe’s largest data centers. Australians recently dealt a blow to one planned near the Blue Mountains, as more than 60,000 people have signed petitions to put a pause on data center projects across the country. Canadians took to the streets of Vancouver to stop two AI factories planned for their city while Hamilton, Ontario was forced to put a moratorium on data center plans because public opposition was so great. And let’s not forget the United States, where 75 major data center projects were blocked in the first three months of 2026.

Just a few years ago, most people wouldn’t have even known much about data centers, let alone decided to turn up at public meetings and demonstrations to stop them. But after the tech industry decided generative AI was its next big thing and accelerated the buildout of massive hyperscale data centers to power it, that all started to change.

People saw their power bills shoot up, their water sullied by nearby data center projects, and had to deal with new industrial neighbors bringing light pollution and an incessant hum to their communities. Not to mention that AI itself hasn’t delivered on its promises, while sticking the public with a growing list of harms that includes everything from flooding the zone with AI-generated lies to pushing friends and family members into spirals after they get addicted to chatbots.

I dig into all that and more in my new book, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires.

A little over two years ago, I had a feeling we could be headed in this direction. I’d heard about the chaos data centers were wreaking in Ireland, Northern Virginia, Chile, and even The Dalles, Oregon. Everyone was talking about generative AI, but what about the infrastructure that made it all possible? Before the AI boom, communities in those places were already struggling to shoulder the costs of hyperscale development. But with the proliferation of chatbots and image generators, so many more would come under pressure as the tech industry sought to expand its computing power at any cost.

I felt that was a story more people needed to understand: how the hubris of tech billionaires is putting our communities and our planet at risk to serve their fantastical pursuits of power and profit.

The industry wants us to feel this is all inevitable; that we have no means to fight back agains this wave of supposed progress. But around the world, regular people were showing that wasn’t true. They were taking matters into their own hands, and pushing back some of the most powerful companies in the world.

As the tech industry abandons its climate targets and any pretense of having the public good in mind, these are stories we need to hear and learn from. In Hyperscale, I explain how we got to this place and why this scale of development is inherently unsustainable. I tell the stories of attempts to fight back in different parts of the world and, maybe most importantly, I show that we don’t have to go down this path. We can develop technology in a very different way that puts the public good at the forefront, not shareholder profits or billionaire dreams.

Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires is out on October 20 in Canada and the United States, and on November 5 in the United Kingdom.

You can preorder it wherever you buy your books, including by asking your local bookstore to bring it in! You can also grab a copy from Bookshop in the US or the UK, or get more information on the book’s webpage.

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