‘Eat the rich, save the planet’: climate protesters call out big tech’s disconnect from reality
Climate activists protested outside OpenAI, Google, and Amazon offices in New York City during Climate Week, targeting the tech industry's growing energy demands. Demonstrators also disrupted a closed-door AI health summit, and protesters turned attention to a Brooklyn gas power plant that was reportedly kept open to power AI data centers.
Why this matters: AI infrastructure runs on electricity, and a lot of it. When a gas plant that was scheduled to shut down gets bought instead to keep data centers running, that is a concrete, local consequence of the industry's energy appetite. People near that plant did not vote on that tradeoff. The companies building these systems rarely have to live next to them. That gap between who benefits and who absorbs the costs is what these protests are really pointing at.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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