Hollywood has done its share of imagining how a war between humans and AIs might play out. Armies of metallic skeletons. Flights of machinegun-toting drones. Or maybe just a rain of nuclear bombs.
But you don't have to wait for Judgment Day to witness the war between humans and our new silicon overlords. You only have to turn on the tap, pay your bills, or look for a new job. The fight is underway, and it's affecting you in more ways than you may realize.
Humanity is already deep into a struggle over Earth's basic resources. That fight isn't really humans vs. AI. It's 99.99% of humanity against the 0.01% willing to provide AIs with anything to secure their permanent place at the top of the pyramid.
Water
As the climate warms and rainfall patterns shift, many areas of the world, including parts of the United States, are experiencing a diminished availability of freshwater. That's especially true for cities like Austin, Phoenix, and El Paso, where populations continue to increase even as water resources shrink.
But some of these same areas are also home to the massive data centers necessary to keep the billionaire's AI gamble moving forward. The result is situations where human residents are being asked to reduce their water use to leave more for the robots.
According to a July 2025 investigation by The Austin Chronicle, data centers across Central Texas are consuming millions of gallons of water every day. This comes as many residents are being asked to reduce their usage due to dwindling supplies.
The thirst of these data centers is immense. Microsoft's San Antonio data center consumed 463 million gallons of water in the last two years. That's just one data center from just one company.
As Texas faces a continuing drought, and farmers, businesses, and individuals are all confronting water restrictions, what kind of limits are being put on AI data centers of ever-increasing size? None at all.
In a white paper to be released this month, HARC estimates that data centers in Texas will consume 49 billion gallons of water in 2025. They also project that by 2030, that number could rise up to 399 billion gallons, or 6.6% of total water use in Texas.
It's not as if this water can go back into the system after being used by the data centers. Most of these centers run so hot that they use evaporative cooling. The water that comes into the centers exits as steam. This is water lost to humans, to agriculture, and to the natural environment of the area.
Energy
All that AI silicon is red hot because it consumes astounding amounts of energy. It's hard to get accurate numbers on just how much energy, because tech firms are hiding the amount of power and water they are actually consuming.
OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, responded with a prepared statement, but declined to answer specific questions, such as how much power and water the chatbot used. “AI can be energy-intensive and that’s why we are constantly working to improve efficiencies,” OpenAI said.
How energy-intensive? A single new data center in Abilene, Texas, operated by OpenAI and Oracle, is expected to draw a jaw-dropping 1.2 GW of power. Not only is that enough energy to send Marty McFly back to the future, it's the equivalent of at least 750,000 homes.
The population of Abilene is 130,500. This new data center will use almost six times as much power as the entire human population of the city that hosts it.
Not surprisingly, providing that much juice means building a new power plant, which will consume natural gas. It also means making major changes to the local energy grid. That new power plant will also require millions of gallons of water.
The situation in Abilene is far from unique. Thanks to Texas's generous tax policies and willingness to look the other way when considering environmental and cultural impacts of gigantic data centers popping up across the landscape, the power demand of new data centers is expected to more than double the state's total electricity usage in the next five years.
Google's data centers consumed over 30 GW of electricity in 2024. Or about twice all the energy consumed in San Francisco.
While many of these companies brag that they are building their own power plants, consumers are often left footing the bill for improvements to the power grid necessary to support the enormous loads. AI data centers are already driving up the cost of electricity—and the cost of the fuels that create that electricity.
As terrible as the numbers being announced may seem, the energy costs that the industry is hiding are even worse.
A study published last year by Lawerence Berkley National Lab calculated exactly how big the phantom data center issue might be, and they found that projected energy demand could be as much as 255 terawatt-hours of energy higher than real energy demand. That’s enough energy to provide power to more than 24 million households.
The cost and availability of energy is already being directly affected by the demands of data centers built to support power and water-hungry LLM-based AI. It's getting rapidly worse, and the true scope of the issue is being deliberately suppressed by the billionaire-owned tech companies behind this issue.
Climate
Warnings about the climate cost of data centers have been raised—and largely ignored—since LLMs burst out of R&D departments in 2018. While companies may make claims about creating systems that are more efficient, the basic nature of an LLM is intrinsically less efficient. It's baked into the basic concept. That's not going to change.
In a 2023 study, completing a simple task using ChatGPT took 33 times as much energy as achieving the same results through traditional computing. For some tasks, ChatGPT consumed "orders of magnitude" more power than a system designed to solve a specific problem.
Because AI corporations are grabbing for power as quickly as they can find it, that has meant buying up coal-powered steam plants, natural gas plants… whatever they can find to drive their increasingly power-hungry LLMs in a competition to crank out more cycles than other LLMs.
In this race to the bottom, tech companies have thrown away any pretense of holding themselves to climate goals.
Google's greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 were 48% higher than in 2019, according to its latest environmental report. The tech giant puts it down to the increasing amounts of energy needed by its data centres, exacerbated by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI).
Why does Google need so much more power? Because an ordinary Google query, which used to be evaluated by task-specific code, now generates a response based on an LLM that parses that same query. That result can never be as efficient as task-specific code and may be tens or hundreds of times more costly.
How can companies justify this race to pollute? By claiming that AI will ultimately solve the climate crisis by teaching incompetent humans how to better manage transportation, make manufacturing more efficient, and bring more renewable power online.
In other words, it's okay for AI to burn all the fuel it needs now, because someday, it will save us.
Maybe. But that's a wild gamble.
There are, of course, better ways to manage power grids, lower agricultural costs, and handle transportation routing: They're called purpose-built systems using non-LLM code. These systems can complete the same tasks using a fraction of the energy—and also not suffer from "hallucinations" that make routing cars into walls seem like a good idea.
So if these companies are serious about solving the climate crisis, why aren't they building those systems?
For decades, corporations have resisted making the necessary changes to avert climate change by arguing that restrictions were too costly. But now, many of those same corporations are willing to spend anything in pursuit of AI, even though they know without a doubt that this push is accelerating damage to an already fragile environment.
They are putting not just your life, but the lives of everyone and everything on the planet at risk on the promise that someday, somehow, they will create a system that solves the problem it helped to create.
Humans
In addition to energy and water, LLMs also cost incredible amounts of plain old cash. That included a $5 billion loss for OpenAI in 2024. But don't worry, they have a fresh $40 billion cash infusion headed their way.
OpenAI is just one company. There are currently thousands of significant LLMs being nursed by hundreds of tech companies around the world. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic are all multi-billion-dollar players in the United States, but others like AI21 Labs, Amazon, Contextual, Databricks, Stability, and Mosaic aren't far behind. Canada has Cohere, Coveo, and Element. The UK has HalfSpace, iGenius, and Evolution. China brings familiar names like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent.
All of that is just the tip of the iceberg. Private investment in AI was up 44.5% in just the last year.
But why? Why would the richest people and corporations in the world line up to spend more money than the GDP of two-thirds of the planet on a technology that is less efficient than traditional computing, and also tries to blackmail users when it's not simply making shit up?
Well, prepared to be flattered. The reason these companies are willing to spend any amount of money and burn down the world on the side is all about you. More specifically, it's about making you redundant. You and every other human.
The jobs lost to AI and increasing automation aren't an unfortunate side effect of the next stage in technology; they are the end goal.
This isn't a threat that's lurking in the future. Companies are already replacing workers with AI, and they plan to replace even more this year.
For those wondering when artificial intelligence will start replacing human workers, the answer is that it already has. As AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google Bard become workplace staples and businesses are forced to be more mindful of their bottom lines, automating labor has become a logical course of action for many.
In a country where we've long been taught that increasing the profit for shareholders is all that matters, of course companies are going to ditch employees for AI. That's especially true when LLMs are being made available for next to nothing (or simply for nothing) by corporations whose intention is focused on eliminating workers.
It shouldn't be surprising that some of the companies pushing AI, like Google and Microsoft, are among those who have already ditched thousands of humans. But the nature of the jobs lost at Microsoft should be sounding alarm bells.
The tech giant announced a huge round of layoffs in May, with about 6,000 employees thought to have been affected. Reportedly, the majority of those were programmers. While it has not explicitly confirmed that this is the case, these layoffs come off the back of comments made by CEO Satya Nadella in April, in which he confirmed that around 30% of the company’s code was now written by AI.
The idea that AI is just another technology, and that it will somehow create another round of even better jobs, is possibly the most ludicrous lie being pushed to the public. Microsoft, one of the biggest names in the industry, is deliberately using AI to replace the same people who would be most easily transitioned to those AI jobs… if the AI jobs really existed.
It should be obvious enough that even the most diehard fan of Elon Musk can understand, but to make it simple:
- They are pouring billions into AI because they expect it to pay off big in the end.
- That payoff comes from eliminating human workers. Nothing else.
- If they really thought this would lead to having to pay more people to generate prompts or perform other AI-related tasks, they wouldn't be doing it at all.
End game
Those bullet points are important, but there's one more vital fact that makes everything else infinitely worse.
There is no law, no regulation, and no plan that says those who own the AIs have to share.
Technology researchers love to talk about how, though they may be more costly than human workers now, over time robots will be able to perform any given task for a trivial cost. Robot workers driven by AI overlords will work 24/7/365, deal with their own repairs, and never worry about job safety, ask about parental leave policies, or threaten to go on strike.
What does it mean when automated work is available for pennies? It means that human work is not wanted at any price.
You can throw in every anecdote about the Luddites that you want, or laugh about the end of the buggy whip business, but this is a fundamentally different shift. This is billionaires racing to see who can most benefit from the elimination of labor as a source of income.
And, by the way, the Luddites were absolutely right.
It may be fun to talk about how Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, etc., will just have to share their wealth when humans are kicked out of the automated factories and sent home from shuttered offices. They must share! After all, Something about Henry Ford raising the salary of his workers so they could afford cars. Something about riots in the streets if they don't.
Sure. Except that's not why Ford raised the salary of his employees, no matter what you've been told in Pithy Sayings from American History. Ford increased pay because working conditions were terrible, and his turnover rate was soaring. He needed to keep experienced workers on the line because experienced workers were the source of his wealth.
That's not true of the people racing to destroy their workforce. They won't need anything from you; not your labor, not your business. They certainly won't need your money. You don't have any damned money.
What about the idea that most of the population will rise up and break out the old tar and feathers? Sure. Just like they did when states stopped providing free college. Just like they did when corporations broke the centuries-long connection between productivity and compensation. Just like they did when billionaires took away pensions and replaced them with a stock-based swindle. Just like they did when millions lost their medical coverage. Just like they did when the Supreme Court made it clear that anyone can be carried away without charge by masked men who can throw them into a concentration camp or ship them to eternal enslavement. Just like they did when the government sent armed Marines to suppress protests in an American city.
At this moment, we are facing an existential crisis from human-generated climate change, a fundamental threat to our economic system from a concerted attack on the value of labor, and an unchecked movement to replace democracy with white nationalist fascism. But somehow, the morning "news" still has a lot more time to talk about a new line of flattering swimsuits than it can spare for the destruction of science, education, and democracy.
The billionaires have every reason to think that they can get away with this. They get away with it every damn day.
The only way to change that is to do what the algorithm doesn't predict: Act.
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