Hyperscale: Paris Marx on the Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's the 20th of October, a Tuesday, 2026 As the year begins to get to its end, we're on the Financial Times, the best business books of the year. They put out their long list. And one of the books on it is a particularly intriguing one. It's out today. It's called Hyperscale, Ambition, Power and the Relentless Rise of Data Empires. It's by my guest, Paris Marx, a writer, podcast based in St. John's, Newfoundland, and he's joining us today. Congratulations, Paris, on the new book. It's already getting great buzz. I have to ask you, I of course went to Gemini to find out what Hyperscale means. Although I guess that might be a bit of a contradiction in terms since Gemini is owned by Google, the ultimate hyperscaler. What does the word mean?

Paris Marx (1:24)

Yeah. It's really about the scale, the size. Especially when we're talking about data centers, it's data centers that are of a particular scale.

We're used to data centers. We've had them for decades. But when we're talking about hyperscale data centers, we're talking about these ones that because of the centralization of computation that we've had for the past couple of decades, particularly with the cloud providers, these data centers have just become so large. For me, the thing that stands out about hyperscale computing and hyperscale data centers is the demands that they make on the communities and the places where they are located. That is why we've been having these discussions for the past couple of years about the amount of electricity, the amount of water, just the local impacts that can come of these hyperscale data centers.

Andrew Keen (2:12)

People often use the term Paris Big Tech, but is hyperscale then a better word to describe, quote unquote, big tech? I'm guessing that the companies in particular are the big cloud companies like Amazon, of course, with their web services, Google who own Gemini, their cloud platform and Microsoft Azure.

They're different from the classic AI companies that people seem to be obsessed with, the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

Paris Marx (2:45)

Absolutely. There can certainly be overlap there, because obviously Google and these other companies are working on AI models and AI products themselves. But when we're talking about hyperscalers, we're really talking about the data center side of things. If we're thinking about big tech, that can refer to a lot of different companies that do different things and they are large in scale. Apple would be part of that as well, even though they wouldn't really be one of these massive companies building out a ton of hyperscale data centers in the way that we see with Amazon, Microsoft and Google in particular, but Meta is also getting into that game, or has been in a significant way in the past few years.

It really refers to just the scale of computation that's being built out. Certainly, we do see OpenAI and Anthropic building some of their own data centers, and those would be hyperscale data centers. But when you think of just the amount of data centers they have, the amount of computation that would be at their disposal that they directly control, it would be significantly less than what we see with those dominant Cloud companies, the Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in particular. Though, again, Meta is really moving in there too.

Andrew Keen (3:53)

Yeah, I forgot about our friend Mark Zuckerberg and Meta.

And I'm guessing also, you're not a big fan of Elon Musk. You've written a lot of stuff about him. He's not the most popular person, I think, in the world these days, particularly on shows like this. You wrote about Elon Musk being convinced that he's the future. I assume that SpaceX also is a weird kind of hybrid, somewhere between the frontier companies and the classic hyperscalers.

Paris Marx (4:21)

Absolutely. It's kind of fascinating how SpaceX, over the course of a year, has been transformed from a space company to an AI company as XAI has been integrated. Of course, when we saw when SpaceX went public, the massive part of the future revenue projections were based around the AI potential of XAI and things like that. I think already those predictions don't seem to be playing out, as I think many people could have expected.

But obviously, certainly Elon Musk has, he has long been in this game as one of the early co-founders and funders of OpenAI, of course, was left that project or pushed out depending on who you talk to about that. But as generative AI has taken off, he has really sought to make himself part of that conversation and part of that discussion, which is why we have the founding of XAI a few years ago, and his push to build out some really large data centers in Mississippi and in Tennessee in particular, which as much of the reporting has shown, has had some really significant consequences for the communities around them, in particular in terms of the local air quality and local impacts that can come with the burning of all the fossil fuels from those generators powering them.