korrents

korrents · piece

A year in, the data center/AI battle starts to clarify

Bill McKibben · 21 Aug 2026 · billmckibben.substack.com

3 korrents from this piece

Bill McKibben did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. It's clear by now that this is all part of the extension of oligarchic control over our lives.
  2. Its's clear by now that AI, and the data center development underlying it, pose real and significant dangers.
  3. But it seems increasingly clear to me that those limitations are precisely what makes being a human so interesting.