The Truth About Data Centers w/ Paris Marx

When Google needed to expand its data center in The Dalles, Oregon a few years ago, the city council asked a reasonable question: how much water is Google actually using? Google refused to share the figure. When a journalist at the Oregonian pressed for the information, Google got the city council to sue the journalist to keep the data secret. After a year of public backlash, Google relented and disclosed that it was consuming 29% of the city's water. This case, as Paris Marx explains in his new book Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech's Data Empires, is a window into how the tech industry operates when building the physical infrastructure that powers our digital lives — and how communities are fighting back.

What Data Centers Actually Are and How They've Changed