Tech Won’t Save Us host Paris Marx pulls back the curtain on the hyperscale data centers powering the AI boom, revealing the cost of these infrastructures for communities and the planet, all while asking whether Silicon Valley’s vision of the future is one worth embracing.
Advance praise
Combining historical research with investigative reporting and lucid analysis, Paris Marx cuts through the industry hype to expose the immeasurable costs of Big Tech’s AI arms race. A tremendous contribution to a debate that is of existential importance to us all.
- Naomi Klein, bestselling author of Doppelganger
If you want to understand where the future is heading, you have to read Paris Marx’s Hyperscale. Urgent and illuminating, this is a perfect primer for the key infrastructure of the 21st century.
- Brian Merchant, bestselling author of Blood in the Machine
A catalog of the drawbacks of data center development, Hyperscale is a book Big Tech does not want you to read.
- Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of Palo Alto
An excellent, timely compendium of the history and layered social, environmental, and health impacts of data centers for anyone who seeks to understand the jaw-dropping numbers and real human-scale stories behind the headlines.
- Karen Hao, bestselling author of Empire of AI
Realistic and inspiring. While the book documents the harms of the broligarchy’s attempt to cover the entire planet with datacenters and create a world in which we can’t live without them, Marx also highlights movements building ‘human scale’ technology, helping us liberate our imagination from the singular path we’ve been sold by the AI industry.
- Timnit Gebru, executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute
Out on October 20 from Bookshop US, Barnes & Noble, and Chapters Indigo
and
November 5 in the UK from Bookshop UK and Waterstones
Find more purchase options at penguinrandomhouse.com or ask your local bookstore
An eye-opening account of how the data-center boom is pushing our planet past its breaking point
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 made our planet a bargaining chip in the next great race for 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 social 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.
About the author
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.
About the publisher
Riverhead Books is a leading publisher of literary fiction and quality nonfiction. Since its inception in 1994, Riverhead has been devoted to publishing authors who change the conversation—urgent, unheard voices from a wide variety of backgrounds who have new perspectives and new stories to tell.
For publicity inquiries, please contact Shailyn Tavella at stavella@penguinrandomhouse.com.