Red Emma’s

“A tremendous contribution to a debate that is of existential importance to us all.” —Naomi Klein, bestselling author of Doppelganger

Underlying our seamless access to AI, cryptocurrency, and unlimited cloud storage is a hulking, costly physical infrastructure. Massive data centers full of energy-hungry chips and processors power everything we do online. Scrambling to meet dubious market demand, the tech giants have leveraged our planet in pursuit of a market monopoly.

In Hyperscale, journalist Paris Marx uncovers the excesses of hyperscale data processing. He exposes the deceptive, exploitative ways tech companies are siphoning energy and resources from vulnerable communities in their pursuit of digital power, abandoning the pretense of social responsibility.

Amid energy shortages and tech-induced battles over drinking water, Marx makes a powerful case for technology that promotes the social good over the bottom lines of tech billionaires. He joins the incredible efforts of people and movements pushing back against the profit-driven interests of Big Tech, illuminating a path toward the sustainable future we all deserve.

The AI boom and its infrastructural demands have accelerated our many modern catastrophes. With razor-sharp reporting and incisive analysis, Marx shows us that the greatest threat is not the specter of AI overlords but a global environmental disaster already in the making.

“Hyperscale _is a book Big Tech does not want you to read.” —Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of _Palo Alto

Co-sponsored by Chesapeake Climate Action Network, which is co-hosting the People over Data Centers Maryland Action Summit on 11/17

Paris Marx is a journalist, host of the acclaimed podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, and author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. He lives in Newfoundland, Canada. Follow Paris on Bluesky or visit his personal website.

Dillon Mahmoudi is an Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at UMBC. He is an urban and economic geographer who studies the physical side of digital capitalism: how data centers, algorithms, and smart-city technologies reshape land, labor, and cities. His work includes early research on the server farms of the Pacific Northwest and, more recently, "Land for AI," which introduces the ideas of data rent and computational rent to explain how firms profit from controlling storage, bandwidth, and the computing power AI depends on. He draws on Marxist political economy, critical GIS, and feminist and anti-racist theory, and much of his work is rooted in Baltimore. Before academia, he worked in the tech industry, including at Microsoft in Redmond and Dublin. He holds a PhD in Urban Studies from Portland State University and a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.