The spooked up builders of Vampire Valley
Who is building the AI data centers fueling the bubble? The same company that built missile and Air Force bases in Taiwan and NATO and is involved in Gaza reconstruction.
I was looking into the mad boom in the construction of data centers — driven by every tech megacorp’s speculative bet on AI. And then I had a simple thought. “H’mmm. I wonder who’s actually building these data centers? It’s gotta be some interesting players. I mean, the whole AI boom might be sold to us peasant consumers as some kind of fun thing — like chatting with a bot, making silly chicken banana videos on Sora. But actually the whole thing is tied up with empire and war. The AI is a strategic resource, central to current and future global US dominance. The CIA, the NSA, every branch of the Pentagon, even the IDF — they got their surveillance and targeting data mixed in with the corporate and consumer stuff on servers owned by Google, Amazon. It’s all mixed up now. So the question: Who is building and designing all these data centers? Who can be trusted with such strategic assets?”
Well, it didn’t take me long to find out that one of the main players in the data center building business is a company called AECOM. Their most recent project is a mega Google data center in Virginia codenamed Project Peanut, which Google says will be powered by a fusion reactor within a few years. And that’s funny because as far as I understand it, fusion reactors have never worked to provide energy — not even in controlled experiments. So is this fusion thing just a ruse meant to placate the local Virginia yokels so that Google can get the center built? And then once that’s done, Google can just power from conventional sources?Sorry neighbors. Your electricity bill will go up so that Google’s stock keeps its value and Israel has plenty of server space to store its targeting data.
But anyway, AECOM. I had never heard of it before, but it turns out it has quite a history. The megacorp has gone by many names and is basically an extension of the Empire — a privatized design/architecture/computer/management/weapons/energy/intelligence provider arm of the state. It’s done all sorts of things — from building schools and wastewater plants in LA to designing US military bases and missile installation on foreign soil (including in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and NATO countries) to building ICBM facilities to helping the CIA analyze surveillance data on Soviet nuclear sites to, most recently, trying to wet its beak by getting involved in Gaza “reconstruction.” Of course, people working for the company had to get top secret clearance.
A new book just came out on this company that examines its embedded place within the post-WWII global American hegemony. I’ve skimmed it and it looks great.
Here’s a bit from Kate Wagner’s recent review of it:
The book traces architecture’s role in postwar and Cold War American imperialism through the history of Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall (DMJM), the firm later known as AECOM. Often viewed by critics and practitioners as a shadowy behemoth whose role blurs the line between an architecture and engineering firm and a defense contractor, AECOM is the biggest such firm in the world, with its thumb in seemingly every pie, including less savory ones such as inquiries into the reconstruction of a post-urbicide Gaza and water infrastructure for the now-beleaguered NEOM megaproject in Saudi Arabia. Were—one will learn in Cayer’s book—it ever thus!
Did you know, for example, that DMJM was implicated in the Watergate scandal? And in the Jakarta program that saw the extrajudicial killing of civilians under the guise of rooting out communism? Did you know that its relationship with the Saudis goes back to the 1970s? Or that DMJM bought a warplane and refurbished it with surveying equipment that would later be used in the construction of U.S. air bases abroad? Or that it was, for a time, bought out by the Ashland Oil company, which sought to use its geospatial services for oil production? Did you know that it did a building for the CIA?
A great company doing great work building out the infrastructure of our next great big technological utopian hope: letting a handful of spooked up mega corps gobble up all the world’s data and kill our planet in the process. If you are an investor, apparently Jim Cramer says AECOM’s stock is HOT HOT HOT!
—Yasha
Make sure you come out to our talk/book discussion on AI and the politics of technology.
This Sunday at the KGB BAR in NYC. 7pm!
Don't forget the huge environmental impact these data centers have. Ruin the local environment, and the noise they generate ruins everything around them .
Just watched a short documentary about residents near a data center in Texas. The noise it makes has basically makes living near a data center impossible.