The Invisible Trillion
A Note to the Reader
A while ago, a kid asked her mom whether data centers really use too much water. It’s a question that’s been going around online. The mom asked me, and I didn’t have a good answer. I use a lot of AI, but the honest reply to a direct question about it was I’d have to go look it up. So I went and looked it up. Then I kept going, because once you pull on one of these threads the whole sweater comes along with it.
The water question pulls on the energy question, which pulls on how chips are made, which pulls on where data centers get built, which pulls on what they’re built for, which pulls on who decides any of it, which pulls on who pays when the deciders get it wrong. I set out to write you a short answer about water. I ended up writing the book you’re holding.
I want to tell you how it changed while I was writing it, because the change is part of what the book is now.
When I started, I expected the answer to is all of this worth it to be yes, mostly, with caveats. The technology is real. The benefits are real. We are at a genuine inflection point, and some of the people building this will be remembered for a long time. The first several chapters are written mostly from inside that frame, and you can read them on their own if that’s the mood you’re in.
But the further I got into how the buildout is actually being executed — where the data centers go, who pays for them, what legal tools get used against the towns that host them, and how much of it is justified by real, durable demand rather than speculation that may never pay off — the harder it was to keep writing only from that frame. The honest version of the story includes things I hadn’t known when I started, and things the industry mostly doesn’t volunteer. I had to include them. Leaving them out would have handed you a book that flattered the industry instead of one that taught you to think clearly about the world you’re inheriting. You deserve the second kind.
So the middle of the book isn’t comfortable. There are chapters about neighborhoods damaged by infrastructure they never chose to host; about retirement savings — your grandparents’, your parents’ — being poured into a buildout that may or may not pay off; about the legal machinery used to override ordinary people who object to an industrial site going up next to their homes. I’ve tried to make those chapters readable. I can’t make the situation they describe pleasant, because it isn’t, and the people living through it aren’t having a pleasant time.
What I can do is tell you, before you start, what the book asks of you. It asks you to hold several things at once. The technology is real, the productivity gains are real, the stakes are real — and the costs are real, the communities are real, the people losing things are real. The people who built this industry are real human beings who have done remarkable things, and they have made choices that, looked at honestly, have hurt the communities that hosted their decisions. Both are true. The book doesn’t ask you to choose between them. It asks you to hold both, because that is what seeing the situation honestly requires.
A few practical notes on how to read it.
If you want the answer to the water question that started all this, it’s in the water chapter — chapter six.
If you want to understand why your parents may have been grumbling about the electricity bill — yes, that’s real, and yes, it’s rising for reasons that have nothing to do with you leaving the lights on — read the energy chapter, chapter five.
If you read only the chapters about people, read the three at the heart of the book — The Highway in the Bronx, The Legal Weapons, and How a Neighborhood Dies. They are the ones I’d most want an adult to read. If you’re reading this in 2026, they may be describing a community you or someone you know lives in.
The middle stretch — three chapters together — is the analytical part: how much of the buildout real demand justifies, what the right architecture for AI infrastructure would actually look like, and who is paying the bill. Those are denser than the rest. Read them or skip them; if you read them, you’ll close the book able to read the news about AI more clearly than most adults who have opinions about it. If you skip them, come back when you’re older.
One chapter steps back to ask what all this is for — the medicines, the discoveries, the access the chips make possible. The last two are about who decides any of it, and what can be done about it.
— Meira
Questions to talk about
No answer key. These are for arguing over, with someone who read the same chapter.
- The author set out to answer one question about water and ended up writing a whole book, because pulling one thread brought the sweater. Has a simple question ever done that to you?
- He says his own view changed while writing, and that the early chapters are written from inside the frame he started with. Should an author rewrite the beginning to match where they ended up, or leave the change visible?
- 'I'd have to go look it up' was his honest first answer. Why is that a hard sentence for an adult to say, and what does it cost when they say something else instead?
All 19 chapters of The Invisible Trillion · Library · All courses