In America’s frontier days, anyone diverting a town’s creek water to their private, profiteering purpose was not merely considered wrong, but guilty of Biblical-level immorality.
That was BBE, however — “Before Billionaire Ethics.”
Today, a cohort of über-rich hucksters — including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, X’s Elon Musk, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — have unilaterally decreed that they are above such moral fussiness, entitled to exploit the scarce water resources of millions of Americans, especially in rural areas.
They’re not irrigating crops, but continuously spritzing hundreds of thousands of the super-computers they’re “planting” in the hyperscale AI data centers being built across the country. These are “computer ranches,” digesting and constantly spewing out electronic data to run artificial intelligence bots that the tech billionaires are creating to replace us human workers.
Jobs aside, each of these concrete complexes is a massive water hog.
Amazon, Meta, and the rest use millions of gallons a day of fresh, unrecycled water, just to keep their computers cool. States like Texas face recurring drought, yet billionaires insist on draining our aquifers and rivers to water their computers. In Texas alone, more than 400 of these sprawling data centers have already been built or are under construction.
Meanwhile, a grassroots movement is spreading across the country to oppose this grab. But don’t expect billionaires to show even an iota of respect for the common good. Indeed, they’re now funding an all-out PR blitz and political campaign to demonize these local rebellions.
Worse, they are doubling down on their plutocratic power grab, demanding that Congress pre-emptively outlaw state and local officials from regulating, much less barring, these invasive schemes.
To help battle these profiteers, go to www.mediajustice.org/tools.
