Source: Paul Kedrosky
The emergence of AI infrastructure as a literal heat-generating force reshaping local geographies signals that the connected world’s energy demands are no longer invisible—they’re materializing as measurable environmental externalities that will force a reckoning between compute density and habitability, particularly in regions where data center sprawl currently operates under minimal thermal accountability. This marks the transition from “cloud computing” as convenient metaphor to “cloud computing” as concrete climate problem that will eventually trigger zoning conflicts, regulatory pushback, and a disaggregation of compute infrastructure away from today’s concentrated hyperscaler model.