Big Tech likes to see itself as a democratising force. Fintech brings banking to the unbanked, TikTok makes everyone a star. It was always a tenuous argument; AI knocks it clean off the pitch — by making access to some resources even more exclusive.
Building and running data centres guzzles materials; when supply lags, more established customers fall to the back of the queue. Take chips. Micron, the third-biggest maker of memory, pulled out of the consumer market earlier this year to fill orders from data centres or, as the company put it, “our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments”. Prices for PCs and other consumer goods rose, as did lead times.
Labour is emerging as the next bottleneck. AI has drawn more attention for the jobs it’s eliminating but Big Tech — planning to spend a combined $725bn on infrastructure — has woken up to the need for brawn and crafts skills to build and maintain data centres. This month Facebook owner Meta Platforms launched “America’s Workforce Academy” to train skilled tradespeople; Google is bent on similar endeavours.