The Hidden Cost of Digital Power
As artificial intelligence reshapes the world, the Frontline Club examines the infrastructure collapse and resource depletion fuelling the tech boom, hosting journalist Paris Marx in conversation with critical AI scholar Dr Dan McQuillan.
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The ascendancy of artificial intelligence has captivated the world’s imagination, yet beneath the glittering promises of technological salvation lies a far more troubling infrastructure. While tech companies race to meet the demands of the AI revolution, communities across the globe shoulder the mounting costs of hyperscale development: swelling energy bills that strain local economies, water scarcity intensified by data centre consumption, and mounting environmental degradation that manifests in light and noise pollution affecting human health and wellbeing.
The Frontline Club, that distinguished forum for rigorous journalism and unflinching inquiry, examines this contradiction on 28th October 2026, hosting journalist and broadcaster Paris Marx alongside Dr Dan McQuillan, Senior Lecturer in Critical AI at Goldsmiths. Marx, whose incisive investigations into the deceptive practices of technology companies have already drawn recognition including a Financial Times Business Book of the Year longlisting, brings his formidable scrutiny to bear on the subject through his new book Hyperscale.
The Architecture of Exploitation
Silicon Valley’s vision of the future rests upon a foundation of resource extraction and community displacement. As tech giants wage ever more ambitious wars for power and resources at dangerously unsustainable levels, the true cost becomes impossible to ignore. Data centre projects siphon resources from vulnerable communities least equipped to absorb the consequences, their voices drowned out by the rhetoric of progress and innovation.
Marx’s work exposes how the infrastructure supporting our digital age operates within a framework of deception and exploitation. Through his widely followed programme Tech Won’t Save Us, he has established himself as a crucial counterweight to Silicon Valley’s self congratulatory narratives, asking the questions that matter: whether the vision being sold to us is truly worth embracing, and at what cost to those who bear its heaviest burden.
A Conversation of Reckoning
Dr McQuillan brings to the conversation his scholarly expertise in critical approaches to artificial intelligence, grounded in the understanding that technology is never neutral and that the systems we build embody the values and power structures of their architects. Together, Marx and McQuillan will pull back the curtain on hyperscale data centres and the contradictions at the heart of the AI boom, examining both the grand promises and the human reality beneath them.
The Frontline Club remains a beacon for those who believe journalism and rigorous debate matter. This conversation, at a moment when the stakes of technological development have never been higher, offers a rare opportunity to engage with incisive analysis of how power operates in the digital age, and to consider what alternative futures might be possible.
Imagery courtesy of Frontline Club (@frontlineclub).