Drilling Deep: Karen Hao on How Big AI Is Gambling with the Planet’s Chips

Mar 17, 2026

Karen Hao, award-winning journalist and author of Empire of AI, explores AI as an ideological and imperial project. She discusses how AGI rhetoric masks massive energy and water demands. She compares Big Tech’s tactics to fossil fuel playbooks and critiques secrecy, hyperscaling, and environmental opacity. She also highlights community resistance to data-extraction projects.

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INSIGHT

AI As An Ideological Project

AI is an ideology aiming to recreate human intelligence and legitimize replacing humans with algorithms.
Karen Hao traces this from AI's 1956 origins to today's scale doctrine that privileges monopoly power over scientific rationale.

INSIGHT

AGI Is A Shape-Shifting Rhetorical Tool

AGI is ill-defined and used rhetorically to suit different audiences from Congress to CEOs to consumers.
OpenAI's shifting definitions (e.g., 'outperform humans' versus 'generate $100 billion') show AGI functions as a flexible PR tool.

INSIGHT

Big AI Is Betting The Planet's Resources

The AI industry's growth trajectory is a planetary-scale gamble justified by the promise that future AGI will solve climate harms.
McKinsey estimates need 2–6 times California's energy within five years, mostly from fossil fuels, worsening pollution and water stress.

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What is “artificial intelligence”? Is it a fancy technology? A management consulting buzzword? A PR effort to inflate corporate share prices? A political project designed to shape the world more to the liking of the billionaire class? A way to replace needy human workers with machines?

Perhaps it’s all of that—and more. In her groundbreaking book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, award-winning journalist Karen Hao argues that AI—and the profit-driven infrastructure that surrounds it—is a colonial project. What OpenAI boss Altman and his fellow ideologues in Silicon Valley are pursuing, Hao says, is not just corporate power but imperial power. They are building empires. And as history shows, empires are built on resource extraction, particularly the old-fashioned kind: of labor, energy, minerals, land, water.

Seemingly overnight, tech elites’ feel-good climate promises have evaporated, having been seamlessly swapped for slippery promises that so-called “artificial general intelligence” will save the planet for us. Never mind that AGI is a fantastical concept that has no agreed-upon definition, or that, more fundamentally, it appears nowhere close to existing. In Big Tech’s frenzied pursuit of the “hyperscale” AI dominance that evangelists claim will unlock AGI, as well as its expanding alliances with fossil fuel-backed petrostates and authoritarian political movements, the industry has become an increasingly central contributor to the climate crisis.

In an October conversation with Drilled, Hao discussed how Silicon Valley giants appear to be following the oil and gas industry’s playbook of disinformation and deceit; how Altman and OpenAI’s secrecy and disingenuous rhetoric transformed the field of AI research into corporate PR; and why the destructive trajectory of AI scale and commercialization is not inevitable—no matter what its power-hungry proponents would have you believe.

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