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It’s easy to believe the myth that the digital world is clean, green, and immaterial. After all, our emails float through invisible clouds, our smartphones feel feather-light, and streaming a movie seems so much less wasteful than buying a DVD. But what if this “cloud” is really a storm—one fueled by hidden mines, sprawling data centers, and mountains of raw materials we never see?

Award-winning journalist Guillaume Pitron, author of The Dark Cloud: The Hidden Costs of the Digital World, pulls back the curtain on the true price of our digital conveniences. In a riveting interview, he reveals how our digital habits are deeply physical, and why the vast resource requirements of the “cloud” might be the greatest paradox of our age.

Listen to interview: Must Listen: AI, Data Centers, and the Battle for Critical Metals | Financial Sense

The Paradox of “Dematerialization”: A Tsunami of Minerals

After publishing The Rare Metals War, Pitron encountered a statistic that should stop us in our tracks: “In the next 30 years, humankind will consume more metals and minerals than everything that has been consumed and extracted from the ground for the last 70,000 years.” This shocking demand isn’t coming just from traditional industries, but from the “green” and digital technologies we’re told will save the planet—solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, and, perhaps most voraciously, our digital infrastructure run by vast data centers.

The promise of “dematerialization”—the idea that our lives are moving into a clean, immaterial cloud—couldn’t be further from the truth. As Pitron explains, every digital action is deeply physical and intensely resource-hungry. Sending a simple email, even to someone a meter away, actually means your data travels thousands of kilometers through a vast ecosystem of servers, undersea cables, and satellites. Each of these layers is built and maintained with staggering quantities of minerals—copper, lithium, cobalt, rare earths—and huge volumes of water for cooling and processing.

The Myth of the Green Cloud: Water, Metals, and Mountains of Waste

Tech companies love to market digital as green: paperless offices, cloud storage, and virtual everything. But Pitron exposes this as a dangerous illusion. “We only see these technologies through the best angle, which is what it brings to the planet,” he says. The hidden costs—massive mines, relentless energy and water demand, and a vast web of cables—are almost always left out of the story.

Take the smartphone: “An iPhone is probably featuring 60 different metals which you need to mine somewhere,” Pitron points out. These include lithium from water-intensive brine fields in South America, cobalt from the Congo, and rare earths from China—each extraction process leaving behind polluted water, toxic waste, and devastated ecosystems. Even more staggering is the ratio of resources consumed to product output. “To make a 150-gram phone, you need 183 kilograms of raw materials during all the life cycles of the product,” Pitron explains. That’s over a thousand times the weight of the device itself—most of it water and minerals you never see.

And then there’s the digital infrastructure: 1.2 million kilometers of fiber optic cables, energy-hungry data centers that use vast amounts of water for cooling, and power plants running around the clock. The so-called “cloud” is, in reality, built on mountains of tangible, finite resources.

The Obsolescence Trap: Waste on a Planetary Scale

Pitron’s investigation doesn’t just focus on the hardware, but on our throwaway culture. Today’s smartphones use five times as many raw materials as their early ancestors, and each new generation requires even more exotic minerals and water-intensive manufacturing steps. Yet, we discard them faster than ever—often not because they’re broken, but because of built-in obsolescence, software updates, or simply the lure of a new model.

Three kinds of obsolescence—planned, software, and cultural—drive this wasteful cycle. Batteries are glued in, making repairs difficult; new updates leave old devices lagging; and consumer culture pressures us to upgrade. “Even if your past phone perfectly works, you just want to change it because you want to get the latest one,” Pitron observes.

The consequences are immense: “Today, there are about 34 billion of these devices all around the world, and they account for 70% of the world’s digital pollution.” Every phone, tablet, or laptop thrown away represents not just wasted electronics, but wasted water, minerals, and energy—all extracted at environmental cost. Imagine the impact if we simply kept our gadgets longer, repaired them, or resisted the upgrade cycle. “That would change things. But we’re not ready for that,” Pitron admits—a challenge not just of engineering, but of culture and policy.

Microchips, Data Centers, and the Monster’s Appetite for Water and Minerals

At the very core of the digital world are microchips—tiny, powerful, and shockingly resource-intensive. “You need 16,000 times more materials for producing a chip than the final weight of the chip itself,” Pitron notes. For a single two-gram chip, up to 32 kilograms of water, chemicals, and critical minerals are used in the highly purified, energy-intensive manufacturing process. Semiconductor plants are among the most water-thirsty factories on earth, sometimes drawing on local water supplies at rates that alarm entire communities.

These chips populate billions of smartphones and computers, all feeding data into a global network of data centers—vast, windowless warehouses humming with tens of thousands of servers. “We each individually use, every day, 100 data centers,” Pitron explains. Every swipe, search, or message is copied and stored across multiple centers to ensure reliability and instant access. “Your Gmail account… is replicated in six various data centers.”

The environmental costs are staggering: data centers now compete with cities for electricity, draw millions of gallons of water for cooling, and rely on a constant stream of critical minerals to replace failing hardware. The digital world is a monster with a growing appetite for the planet’s scarcest resources.

The AI Dilemma: Who Controls the Green Future?

As artificial intelligence grows ever more powerful, many hope it will help us optimize our use of resources and reduce waste. But Pitron sees a troubling paradox. The same AI systems that promise efficiency require ever more powerful data centers, more chips, more water, and more minerals to function. As AI algorithms grow, so does the infrastructure behind them—exponentially.

He poses a provocative question: “Would we be happy if artificial intelligence were to embrace the philosophy of deep ecology?” If we cede control to AI to “save the planet,” are we ready for the consequences—especially if a superintelligent system decides that protecting the Earth means limiting or even eliminating human activity?

Pitron’s insight is clear: our technological fixes are entangled with the very problems they aim to solve. The more we “virtualize,” the more we depend on physical, finite resources—especially water and minerals—whose extraction and use reshape landscapes, drain aquifers, and pollute environments. Who decides what costs are acceptable? Who benefits, and who bears the risks? In the years to come, AI will likely take on a greater role in shaping the decisions and outcomes of these questions.

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