As soon as Lars Ruiter stepped out of his car, he was confronted by a Microsoft security guard seething with anger, Morgan Meaker recounted for Wired. Ruiter, a local Dutch councilor, had parked in the rain outside a half-finished Microsoft data center that rose out of the flat North Holland farmland. The guard had seen Ruiter before and did not like him snooping around. Suddenly, the guard had his hands around Ruiter’s throat.
Is there a more secretive empire in the world than Big Tech and its data centers? Big Tech realizes the power of data, the power it has over us when it has our data. Naturally, Big Tech—being full of intelligent people—realizes that if we had the same level of data on it as it has on us, then perhaps we might seek to control Big Tech in similar ways that Big Tech now controls our lives.
There’s an old saying in Big Tech when its tech bros have to respond to people who worry about all the data that Big Tech is sucking up about them: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” It’s such a disarming and innocent-sounding phrase. So comforting. However, does this mean that Big Tech, which hides its own data with a fanatical religiosity, has something very big to hide? Yes, of course it does. Big Tech has an awful lot to hide. It’s royally screwing us and the environment to build and maintain its empire.
Big Tech goes to huge efforts to deny academic institutions or other research bodies access to data that would help highlight the harm Big Tech does. “Without better transparency and more reporting on the issue, it’s impossible to track the real environmental impacts of AI models,” Kate Crawford, a research professor at USC Annenberg, who specializes in the societal impacts of AI, told the Financial Times. According to Julia Velkova, an associate professor at the University of Helsinki, “Big Tech corporations keep their operation secret. These companies are unapproachable and largely disconnected from the places in which they are built. They refuse to talk to researchers or the public but instead communicate through press releases and YouTube videos, through the platforms that they own.”
Data center secrecy is rampant, deliberate and consistent. “When it comes to Google, what’s really striking is the lack of transparency and information when it comes to these projects,” Sebastián Lehuedé, an expert in AI, has stated. How much water do US data centers use? “We don’t really know,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory research scientist Dr. Arman Shehabi explained. “I never thought it could be worse transparency than on the energy side, but we actually know less.” According to Sebastian Moss, writing for Data Center Dynamics, “We don’t know how much water data centers use. We just know it’s a lot.” And Philip Boucher-Hayes, a journalist with the Irish national broadcaster, RTE, stated, “We have been really bad at reporting data centres accurately, largely because the data centres refuse to be transparent. I spent months trying to get interviews with some of the hyperscale operators here. They refused.”