Tech Won't Save Us - 344 Data Vampires Redux: Going Hyperscale (Episode 1)

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Paris’ new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires is coming out on October 20. To celebrate, we’re revisiting the series that planted the seeds for his deep dive into hyperscale data centers, the communities they’re affecting, and the future Silicon Valley is trying to build. This is episode 1 of Data Vampires, a special four-part series from Tech Won’t Save Us.The show is hosted by Paris Marx. Original production on Data Vampires was by Eric Wickham. Current production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.Also mentioned in this episode:Preorder Hyperscale to support Paris at hyperscalebook.com.Senior cloud consultant Dwayne Monroe and Associate Professor in Economics Cecilia Rikap were interviewed for this episode.If you missed it, check out Cecilia Rikap’s latest chat with Paris here and grab her book The Rulers.Interviews with Jeff Bezos and The Oregonian journalist Mike Rogoway were cited.Support the show

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I am your host, Paris Marks, and this month, September 2026, we are doing something a little bit different. As you might know or maybe don't know, I have a new book coming out in October called Hyperscale, The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires. This is a book that really digs into the build out of data centers

that we've been seeing over the past few years, driven in part by generative AI, and certainly the consequences that have come of that for the climate, but also for communities across the United States and around the world. As more and more of these data centers have been being built, we're seeing more and more people push back against them because of the real costs that come with building these next to communities, next to neighborhoods, next to people. And the book really digs into that, why we're seeing that happen, who is being affected by it, and whether this is a future that we have to accept,

and whether we can do something very different. I think it's a book. It's a book that's a book that really meets the moment, right? As we're seeing all of this opposition to data centers growing, it's almost wild that my book is being published right as all this happens. And of course, I would be very grateful if you did pre-order a copy. It means a lot as an author to have pre-orders on the book and is a real kind of sign of confidence in the book even before it comes out. And of course, if you want to do that, there will be a link in the show notes or you can just go to hyperscalebook.com. But ahead of the book coming out, I was thinking about where the seat. of the idea for the book actually came from. And to be honest, they were planted back in 2024

when I was working on this series called Data Vampires to really dig into what we were already seeing from the construction of data centers at that point. Of course, you know, that was earlier in the generative AI moment when all of this stuff was a bit more novel, I guess, and kind of popular attention was just starting to be paid to data centers. It's not that data centers had not affected communities in the past, but as these companies were seeking to build more and more, more communities were starting to feel it. And of course, many more do today, as they have continued building for the two years since I made this series. But since the original idea for this book and kind of how I thought about data centers was really formed as I put together this series, I figured

it would be a good time to revisit it, not just because the book is coming out, but also because the public view on data centers has evolved so much since it was made. And I think the series, really, even though it often refers to figures from 2024, is still incredibly current to the moment. And I think some of you who maybe didn't listen to it at the time, or maybe did, but kind of forgot about it, might still take some important things away from this series. And, you know, maybe it will set you up to want to grab the book and to dig in even more as well. So through this series, there might be some small updates to what we published in 2024, but it's going going to be nothing, you know, too deep, too major. Before we get into it, I do want to say,

the city of the Dals in Oregon, you will notice I pronounce as the Dahls. And it was kind of pointed out to me afterward that I had unfortunately mispronounced the city's name. So apologies for that in advance. But this first episode really digs into, you know, what a data center is, how we got to this moment where so many are being built out and how the cloud really played an important part in this kind of centralized computation that has now become the hyper-scale data centers of the present, and how understanding that is essential

for basically what we're seeing today and what has been birthed out of it. And maybe I would mention as well, one of the people I speak to for this episode is De Sissilea Rickap, and if you're a regular listener of the show, you will have noticed that she has a new book out recently as well called The Rulers,

looking at the power of these cloud giants. So, of course, you can go back and listen to that episode. as well. So sorry for the long introduction on this first episode. I hope that you will enjoy revisiting data vampires through this month. And of course, stay tuned to what I have planned in October, where we'll be digging in even more on data centers to talk to people about what is going on in different parts of the world, where, you know, it's not just the United States that we're seeing this pushback, but in so many different regions and countries. If you do want to pick up

hyperscale at my new book, again, hyperscalebook.com, or you can find the link in the show notes. As always, If you want to support Tech Won't Save Us, the work that I do on this, and of course, get access to full-length interviews with the people who I interviewed for this series, you can support the show on patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us. So enjoy data vampires, enjoy learning more about how we got to the point we are today with data centers, and stick around for future weeks where you can hear the rest of these episodes. Thank you so much. In 2004, a young guy named Chris Saka turned up in the Dahls, Oregon. The city had long been sustained by the aluminum industry, but its 16,000 residents were wondering what was next after the local smelters furnaces had gone cold. Would they become yet

another community across the United States to lose its primary industry and the tax revenue that accompanied it? Or would they find something else to replace it? Luckily for them, Saka came with a possible answer. By that time, the internet had been commercialized and privatized for nearly a decade. The boom and bust of the dot-com bubble was over, and the companies that survived the crash were solidifying their gains and gearing up for another wave of growth. Saka claimed to represent a company called Design LLC that was proposing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to establish a presence in the dolls, build its own facility, and create hundreds of permanent jobs. The facility it was proposing to build was a data center, but there was a catch. It wasn't a

coincidence that this mysterious company was eyeing Oregon for its data center project. Sure, it was close to the internet company hubs, the Bay Area, and Seattle, but it also had particular financial advantages. This is how the Oregonian business journalist Mike Ragoway put it when speaking to the Berkeley Technology Law Journal podcast. Back in the 1980s, Oregon, like a lot of other states, created what they called an enterprise zone program, a set of property tax incentives for the idea was small manufacturers. And you put them in distressed communities, rural, small towns, and try to attract manufacturers by giving them a temporary exemption on their property taxes.

But lawmakers didn't put any cap on the size of those tax breaks. So when the data centers industry emerged two decades later, they looked up at Oregon and said, wait a minute, we can get enormous tax breaks. Those property tax exemptions, as I say, they say. 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars a year or over the life of the exemption, billions of dollars for these really large projects. No wonder companies were looking to Oregon, but for the dolls to win the industry it so desperately wanted, design LLC had a series of demands. It wanted a connection to a transatlantic fiber optic

cable, enough water and energy to meet its needs, and complete secrecy over its business operations. But on top of all of that, it wanted a 15-year property tax break that had to go all the way to the state governor for approval. They were hefty demands, but the dolls didn't have many options, so Saka and the company he claimed to represent got what they wanted. When the data center finally opened in 2006, the mask came off, design LLC. The company behind the facility was revealed to have a much more familiar name, Google. For years after, city officials still didn't want to publicly use the name because of the

confidentiality agreements they'd had to sign years earlier. The dolls became the site of Google's first company-owned data center. with thousands of servers crammed inside a building the size of two football fields. The company was growing and it needed all that infrastructure to power its dominant search engine and its ambitions for future expansion. But Google's data center in the dolls was just one part of a larger shift playing out in the infrastructure powering the internet in that moment. This is Data VanWires, a special four-part series from Tech Won't Save Us assembled by me,

Paris Marks. In the early days of the internet, it was easy to believe that a bit more technology and connectivity would make things better. There were tangible benefits to this new infrastructure and what was happening on the web. But as it was commercialized and as the expectation of massive returns became cemented as part of the tech model, the widespread benefits have been consistently eroded and reduced the promises that never arrived just so a small number of billionaires can make it like bandits. Today, there are few fights more central to deciding our technological future and who benefits from it than the one brewing over data centers around the world. Over the course of this series, we'll learn more

about data centers and how they really work. We'll hear about the impacts they're having in communities around the world and how people are fighting back. We'll dig into how generative AI is an accelerant on this fire and what's driving these powerful people in the tech industry to try to voice

this vision of the future on us regardless of whether we want it or whether it will even make the lives of most people any better. This series was made possible by our supporters over on Patreon. And if you learn something from it, I'd ask you to consider joining them

at patreon.com slash tech1. Don't Save Us, so we can keep doing this important work. Plus, enjoy premium full-length interviews with the experts I spoke to for the series, and I put them together in a special collection whose link you can find in the show notes. Become a supporter at patreon.com slash tech won't save us today. So with that said, let's learn about these data vampires, and by the end, maybe we'll be closer to driving a stake through their hearts. So what is a data center anyway?

They're not necessarily the easiest things to locate, and they're certainly not all the same. If you pull up Google Maps and search for data centers in your city, you might be surprised to find a bunch dotted around downtown cores and urban centers in places you never expected. When I searched in Montreal, there were facilities in nearby office buildings I thought looked practically abandoned, and even one that seemed to be in the same building as a hotel. Our data is stored and processed all over the place. But increasingly, it's happening in large, centralized infrastructures controlled by some of the most powerful tech companies in the world. To get a better picture of what a data center is, I reached out to an expert. Dwayne Monroe has been working in and around data centers for over two decades. He's currently a senior cloud consultant.

Here's how he explained it. Data centers should be thought of as warehouses, filled with servers and also filled with the equipment that supports the creation of platforms. So in the data centers I've been in in my career, there would be hundreds, sometimes thousands of these devices wired up. wired into the corporate network and then wired via connections to say WorldCom or AT&T to the public internet and then networking equipment and switches and hubs and so forth and lots of cables to connect things together you'll just see row after row of computers and they like to take pictures of

them with the lights down so it looks very science fictiony but if you turn the lights up what you see are like just big computers racked together in racks all assembled together and and in a good data center, it'll look nice and neat. I often refer to data centers as server warehouses, so I was happy to hear Dwayne agree with me on that description. Instead of the large warehouses where Amazon stores anything and everything you could possibly think of buying, just swap all those shelves of goods out for computer servers and hard drives, and you've got hyperscale data center.

Those facilities store vast amounts of data and provide the computation for virtually anything you might interact with on the web. Streaming a video on Netflix, doing a Google search, or putting a prompt into chatGBT may seem like an immaterial thing, but behind it all is a ton of hardware, energy, water, mineral resources, and the labor that makes it all work, often in mere milliseconds. There's something pretty incredible about it, but how did it get this way? Data centers in some form have been around for ages, since the early days of computation.

Companies used to have to build their own facilities to manage all the information they held about their business and their customers, and even to this day, many still do. But these days, there's an alternative, one we often call the cloud. They're data centers that are so big they're referred to as hyperscale because of well the scale they operate on. As demands for computation grow, they're the ones that are taking over. One of the first data centers I worked in a number of years ago was for a pharmaceutical firm. Now, by the standards of most corpos, that would be quite large.

There were, I believe, something like 2,000 or 3,000 discrete computers there. hyperscale is much more. And also, rather than, say, just buying servers from Dell, which is what, say, a typical corporo would do, they, what the hyper scalers are doing, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google is they're buying these elements and assembling them together into, like, custom-built kits because they have to pack more computing power into a rack. They're consuming much more real estate because, of course, again, they have the deep pockets to build out very, very big warehouses for these computers. And they're able to create

what we techies would call like a unified API, a unified application programming interface, which can then be presented to customers as if it's like one big database. Technically, hyperscale refers to facilities that are more than 10,000 square feet and that hold more than 5,000 servers. But honestly, those figures feel outdated compared to what we see today. New Amazon data centers often hold closer to 50,000 servers. Meta, on the other hand, is building a facility in Minnesota that will be 750,000 square feet or 12 football fields once it's finished. Microsoft and OpenAI have even mused about building a $100 billion data center complex that would be built next to a nuclear reactor because it would require so much energy. If you think about doing

some intensive tasks on your computer, you might remember how hot it becomes and how loud the fans can get when they try to cool it down if your computer still has a fan at all. Well, I'm sure you can imagine how hot a facility full of many thousands of them will become. And keeping all of those servers cool requires a lot of energy to power air conditioning units and water to fuel cooling systems. But the cloud, as we now call it, didn't come out of nowhere. Basically, what you have is a system in which these companies and Amazon, Microsoft and Google, because they concentrate together, 66% of the global market in this cloud business space, they end up being everywhere. And the more organizations migrate to the cloud, the more dependent they become.

That's Cecilia Rickab, Associate Professor in Economics and Head of Research at University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. You'll hear more from her shortly. There are specific reasons why even major companies outside the tech sector, let alone smaller companies and startups move their operations onto the servers of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. The promise hasn't always worked out, but the cloud giants gained a lot of power in the process. If many large companies already had data centers of their own, what was the value in moving to the centralized infrastructures of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google? It's an important question to understand, and it goes much deeper than the ambitions of those rising cloud companies.

Sure, the launch of Amazon Web Services or AWS's initial services in 2006 and 2007. was a key moment in this whole story, but I want to start us somewhere else with a case Dwayne described to me that I thought was particularly illustrative of the motivations that led to this big shift over the past 15 years. I was working for a firm. We were having some difficulties meeting demand when people were ordering books from the organization's website. And our request, Techie's request to leadership was, listen, we need to buy more.

It's always more servers, more storage, more servers, more storage. Every year they're hearing this, right? And then, well, how much do you need? Oh, maybe 8 million. And then it turns out that you maybe should have spent 10 million, or you spent the $8 million, and you overestimated that technical problem was solved by building on AWS and then using an elastic service on AWS, which could expand and contract in terms of its capacity to meet demand or to respond to demand.

And you can take that story with my particular story from 10 years ago and spread that story out to thousands upon thousands of hundreds of thousands of millions of tech workers trying to solve problems. In the case Dwayne outlined, the book business was constantly seeing its servers get overwhelmed in peak shopping periods, sometimes even losing customers' orders because their website couldn't keep up. There was resistance in management not just to using cloud services, but also to buying even more hardware that would only only be. be needed at limited times during the year. So face with those constraints, the techies, as Dwayne calls them, build a cloud solution anyway, using Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute or EC2 service, which essentially allowed the company to tap into extra computing power provided by Amazon, but only at the moments it needed it. The company would only pay for what was used. Dwayne told me this was how the cloud came in through the back door at many big companies,

because there was a clear appeal in making things work without having to make big new capital investments. What Amazon was saying, and they were the first, and then later Microsoft and Google were saying the same thing, is, listen, this isn't your business. Give it to us. And then all you'll need to do is hire smart people to build these services using our platform will be the outsourcing, in a sense, the utility. So that was the value proposition, as business people say. And that's why it really started to take off. Amazon was the leader in putting together the cloud as we understand it today. That work began in the early 2000s when it was trying to make its own internal processes more efficient.

One of those initiatives was to standardize its infrastructure so its teams could focus on the various digital tools and internal services they were working on instead of having to worry about servers. Here's how CEO Jeff Bezos explained it in an interview with O'Mallick in 2008. Four years ago is when it started and we were, we had enough complexity inside Amazon. We were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. And that, basically, what we decided to do was to build a hardened interface between those two layers so that we could just do course-grained coordination between those two groups. And as we started, Amazon is really just a web-scale application.

And so we realized as we started architecting this set of APIs that it would be useful for everybody, not just for us. And so we said, look, let's make it a new business. It has the potential one day to be a meaningful business for the company. And we need to do it for ourselves anyway. Now, it wasn't actually Bezos himself that had that bright idea. Chris Pinkham was leading the global infrastructure team at the time, and along with his colleague Benjamin Black, believe the service they were building could be valuable well beyond the walls of the growing e-commerce giant. Pinkham and Black put together a short paper for what Pinkham later referred to as,

quote, an infrastructure service for the world. Bezos was intrigued and eventually gave them the green light, not just to work on it, but for Pinkham to build a team in his native South Africa to put it all together. Reflecting on that moment in a later interview, Pinkham said, quote, I spent most of my time trying to hide from Bezos. He was a fun guy to talk to, but you did not want to be his pet project. It also wasn't clear it would become Amazon's next big thing, as Black later told Network World. Quote, it took a long time to get to a point of realizing that this is actually transformative. It was not obvious at the beginning. The two main services AWS launched with in those early days were Elastic Cloud Compute, or EC2, what Dwayne was talking about earlier,

and simple storage service, or S3, which sounds like what it is, a scalable storage solution. There was a clear appeal to companies who didn't see computer infrastructure as their core competency, or product offering to slowly begin the transition to the cloud. That was the case for large companies, but especially smaller ones that were just getting started. Back in 2008, Malik asked Bezos if encouraging cloud startups was part of the plan. This is what he said. That's an interesting idea. It's not something, you know, so far there seem to be a lot of VCs already encouraging

cloud computing web services. You know, we have literally, I rarely run into a startup company today that's not, not using our web services, which we're extremely grateful for that. And we continue to, we, we are determined to continue to do a good job for those customers. It was not immediately obvious that cloud computing was going to transform so much of the infrastructure underpinning the web and the computation of companies large and small. But it's not entirely surprising things worked out that way for a few reasons. As Dwayne described, computational infrastructure was not the core competency of those other companies. Plus, cloud providers like Amazon made an important promise to companies moving to the cloud

that they would save money in the long run. Not needing to make as much capital investment in their own servers and only paying for what they used was supposed to be cheaper. And for a while it was. But like so much involving the tech industry, it eventually came to the point where cloud providers wanted to increase their profits. So they started to push more services on their customers and to hike prices. If we were to step into a time machine and go back to around five years ago,

or so what you were hearing from these companies was you will save money. And of course, every corporation, every organization wants to hear that, that you're going to save money. And so this was the pitch. Now, it hasn't turned out that way. Some of the bills I've seen are eye-wortering much more than companies were spending on premises, much, much more. There's another important reason to consider, though, one that Dwayne touched on, but

Cecilia Recap expanded on in our conversation. For decades, companies have been pushed to out. source as much as they possibly could as a means to cut costs and become more efficient. They shifted manufacturing to places like China and Mexico, shifted customer support to India and the Philippines, tried to reduce their inventories, and even subcontract as much as possible. So why not do the same with computational infrastructure? Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been developing this narrative that the only, the most efficient way to do it, the cheapest and more flexible way of doing it is on their

clouds. The clouds basically are just rented computers. In principle, this sounds very attractive. If you think about the transformations of big corporations since the 70s onwards, in this process, basically, of reducing your tangible assets, it becomes very attractive instead of having to have your own data center in your premises to outsource that to, in this case, Google, Microsoft, or Amazon. And they saw this. They saw this attractiveness of being more flexible. But what the customers didn't see with that outsourcing your digital infrastructure is not as outsourcing call center or outsourcing your manufacturing capacity because it is very much entrenched with the intangible assets themselves, which are also the main asset of these big companies and are also crucial for running a

university, a government and so on. And they are also crucial for startups themselves. One would assume that the goal of outsourcing is to save money at the end of the day. And as Dwayne described, exactly how cloud providers sold their services to companies large and small. If they move their data and operations to the cloud, they would cut their computation bills by millions of dollars. But in practice, that's not how it's worked out for many of them. So why don't they pull out? Why don't AWS and these other cloud businesses collapse? Well, the longer your business is on the cloud and the more you take advantage of other services, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google provide, the harder it can become to extradite your business from it. A company will end up right

all the algorithms, all the code on the cloud. So let's say you choose Amazon Web Services. So you will be doing all your architecture, your software architecture on the cloud. You will be writing code, but in between there will be kind of moments when you call a software as a service that is offered by either directly Amazon Web Services or a third-party company that also offers its services on the cloud. So basically, you keep on writing the code. And one would think, okay, I can access the technology.

That's perfect and cool. And no, what you do is use a technology that is sold to you as a black box. All your software, all your architecture becomes dependent on the cloud, on these different pieces of the cloud, and becomes so expensive to leave and so time consuming that is not only impossible for small companies, but also for larger ones. For cloud-native startups, it becomes virtually impossible to even imagine re-architecting the core of the company to get off the cloud services of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But to a certain degree, that even becomes the case for major corporations, especially as they begin to use more of the services offered through cloud providers, particularly artificial intelligence tools meant to process their data, better target their customers, and the many other uses they can be put to.

Sure, using the cloud may be more costly, but getting off the cloud could take time and energy that may not be worth it. And ultimately, there are some benefits beyond the commercial that can contribute to why a company would stay. What I came to conclude is that they are doing it to escape from uncertainty. They prefer to depend on big tech because if they depend on their cloud, they are not investing all this themselves. And they can always change and update the technologies faster, which for companies that are also operating as intellectual monopolies in their own fields, getting access to the method for innovation, the method that is becoming the primary one, the one that in a way is being imposed as the mainstream, for keep developing intangible assets for these companies ends up being a sort of best alternative available. And in the end, why it's the best alternative available for them

is that it enables them to keep on extracting value from those that participate in their global value chains. Even if we debate how much cloud services benefit users, it is clear this shift has been a boon for cloud providers, none more than Amazon. The company's e-commerce business, isn't a particularly high margin one, and Bezos long kept profit margins low to reinvest in growth and expansion. But once AWS came along, it changed the game. For years, the bulk of Amazon's

profits have come from its cloud division. That's not only kept shareholders happy, but it's fueled the company's expansion into new areas, including everything from film and television to pharmaceuticals. Amazon could lose money dominating other industries because the cloud business was there to support its ambitions. In the first quarter of 2024, AWS accounted for just 17% of Amazon's total revenue, but a full 62% of its profits. It's no wonder Amazon and its competitors

want to keep the cloud profits coming. There are plenty of data centers throughout the world, but remember the distinction we made earlier in this episode between hyperscale data centers and everything else. It's the massive hyperscalers, the kind being built to power the cloud businesses of companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, that we're really concerned about. They not only have massive resource demands, but they signal

a further consolidation and centralization of the infrastructure that powers the web in the hands of a small number of powerful, and in this case, American companies. Let's look at the numbers. In 2018, Synergy Research Group estimated there were 430 hyperscale data centers worldwide. 40% of those facilities were in the United States, with China, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany, collectively accounting for another 30%. At the end of 2020, Synergy counted 597 hyperscale data centers worldwide, a number that had more than doubled in five years. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google were responsible for more than half of them, with Oracle, Alibaba, and Meta, or Facebook adding quite a number of their own. But they were just getting started. Between the

increasing internet dependence created by the pandemic, the continual growth of the vast data collection by these tech companies, and their efforts to get more people using more computationally intensive AI products, culminating in the generative AI hype of the past couple of years, the major cloud companies have been making major investments to more rapidly expand their networks. At the end of 2023, Synergy counted 992 hyperscale data centers, and that number ticked over 1,000 at the beginning of 2024. Synergy expected the number to double again within four years, but more importantly, it noted that the scale of those facilities was increasing. They were continually getting larger, covering more space, holding more servers,

and making greater demands on local electricity grids and water resources to serve the bottom lines of major tech companies. It counted 440 new facilities underway, but through 2024, the major tech companies and cloud providers have been throwing around money in every corner of the world to start building the foundations for new data center projects. I want to highlight those numbers for you one more time. At the end of 2018, there were 430 hyperscale data centers. By 2020, that had increased to 597. At the end of 2023, it was 992, and now it's over 1,000, with hundreds more in the pipeline. Earlier this year, Microsoft announced it spent $50 billion on data centers between July, 23 and June 24, alone, and was planning

to add new server capacity much faster than in the past. Amazon committed $150 billion to data Center expansion, with $50 billion alone dedicated to projects in the United States in the first half of 2024. These companies are serious, not just about expanding their businesses, but increasing the amount of computation our societies require, regardless of whether they are corresponding social benefits. At the end of the day, the bottom line comes before everything else. Let's say you just made $10 billion a year by just providing nice software that people wanted, and you had modest growth or maybe no growth. Well, we know that the way our system functions, that would just be unacceptable.

You'd be punished by the market and so forth and so on. How do you increase the consumption of computation above and beyond what actually is required are what organizations and individual people are asking for? And this is what they're trying to do by cramming so-called AI into every nook and cranny because it does require such an incredible buildout. To close off this episode, let's go back to the Dulls, the city in Oregon that became the site of Google's first company-owned data center. Fast forward 15 years, and residents were starting to ask questions about how much they were really benefiting from the arrangement and the effects of all the water needed to supply Google's growing data center footprint as it continued to add new facilities to augment the original one from 2006.

Oregon might be thought of as a wet state with plenty of water, but the Dalls is in a county that's regularly subject to drought, and that has naturally made residents concerned about all the water going to Google. The tax break on its initial data center is over, so the company is paying significant sums into city coffers. But even still, Adam Cecil, a journalist at Fortune, reported that residents used to refer to it as Voldemort Industries, in part because of the secrecy and the Harry Potter villain's nickname being he who must not be named. In 2021, Google was negotiating a new water deal when residents' concerns finally came to a head. The Oregonian, a statewide newspaper, requested the figures for Google's water use from the city.

And instead of providing them, the paper in the city ended up in court with Google paying the city's legal bills to keep the information private. It was the legacy of the agreement 15 years earlier to keep all of Google's operations a secret. Here's how Oregonian journalist Mike Roggeway described it to the Berkeley Technology Law Journal podcast. Well, so if we go back to 2021, we got our readers out in the doubt. said, oh, Google is seeking a lot more water from the city, and they want a new water deal to help finance that. And I thought, well, we should understand that. So I called the water utility manager for the city, a fellow named Dave Anderson, and asked him about the deal that Google was seeking, and he walked me through it. And that was great. But in a poor example of

reporting, I forgot to ask him how much water Google was using at the time. And as soon as I hung up, I'm like, oh, I forgot to ask the most basic question. So I hopped on the email and sent Dave a note and said, oh, I forgot to ask. So stupid. How much water is Google using now? Well, that email set off a chain of events then that Google asserted that its water use was a trade secret and instructed the city not to tell us. Oregon has a sort of unusual public records process that the city said, oh, it's a trade secret. We can't tell you.

So we appealed to the county district attorney. and said that they have no case here. They have to give us this information. They're a public utility, and this is public information. And the district attorney agreed and ordered the city to hand over data about Google's water use. Well, Google then instructed the city to sue us to prevent us from getting access to that data, which is what Oregon Public Records Law requires if a city wants to block the records. And so Google said it was contractually bound to do what Google ordered and did, in fact, sue us.

Well, we fought the suit, and a nonprofit organization called Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press stepped in and provided legal representation for us, limit our legal exposure. We felt strongly from the beginning, as did the RCFP, that the law was on our side. And it took about a year, but Google gave up. And they agreed to give us everything we wanted, as well as pay for the city's legal costs and our legal costs. As Google fought to keep its water use figure secret, it found itself facing. a growing public relations nightmare and finally relented. When it shared its water use figures for the dolls, people were shocked at what it showed. In just five years, Google's water use in the city had tripled.

Its facilities used 355 million gallons of water in 2021, which was the equivalent of 29% of all the water used in the city that year, and it still watered more to cool additional facilities. As one resident told the Oregonian, quote, Google's become a water vampire. But it's not just the dolls asking them. those questions about the massive data centers being built and planned for their communities. Around the world, groups of concern citizens are asking questions about these infrastructures and pushing back on plans they feel aren't in their interests. Those fights could become central to a wider campaign to reassert collective power and sovereignty

over technology. And that's what we'll be exploring in next week's episode. Data Vampires is a special four-part series from Tech Won't Save Us, hosted by me, Paris Marks. This original series was produced by Eric. Wickham and updates were made by our producer, Kyla Houston. This series was made possible through the support from our listeners at patreon.com slash tech won't save us.

We've already uploaded the uncut interviews of some of the guests I spoke to for this series exclusively for Patreon supporters. So make sure to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us to support the show and make sure to order your copy of Hyperscale, the ambition and excess of big techs data empires. You can find more information about that at Hyperscalebook.com.