Paradigms

Our first story of real data center resistance begins with Marina Otero Verzier, a Spanish architect, researcher, and Harvard GSD lecturer. In her search for more eco-social data centers in Chile and Spain, Marina pushed the voice of local communities up to the level of government at a moment when hyperscale companies wanted to be louder, and helped develop Chile's first National Data Center Plan...

An AI-driven data center boom has led to a global frenzy to find land, power, water, and servers for these digital infrastructures. As the material consequences of this data center race become real, local communities are starting to push back as protests and litigation aimed at local data center projects errupt all over the world. In this podcast series, we unpack commonalities in local data cente...

If compute is to AI what energy is to an aluminum plant, what happens when we start treating it like a utility? As 2025 draws to a close, tech firms have already poured over $400 billion into AI infrastructure globally – and AI continues to reshape our world with each passing second. While AI tools and products become woven into government services, businesses, and our daily routines, we stop to a...

How can we create responsible regulation when the AI race has just begun and there's still little evidence of its benefits for the European market and society? As the European Commission seeks public input on its upcoming Cloud & AI Development Act and its potential impacts, it aims to build more European data centers to match the economic power of the US and China in AI & cloud computing....

As large investments are being poured into artificial intelligence technology, tech companies paint a picture of a near future where AI agents do most work for you – but is that realistic? What even is an AI agent and how does it differ from assistants like ChatGPT? With companies claiming that these technologies can become autonomous workers able to handle complex tasks independently, it's crucia...

What happens when a tech giant becomes a media monopoly? As Meta faces scrutiny over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, hosts Zuzana Ľudviková and Max Schulze explore Meta's ongoing antitrust trial with the US Federal Trade Commission and examine Meta's identity and inner workings – as a media conglomerate and a large-scale attention factory fueled by users' free labor of watching and scr...