A tower to ‘the cloud’

Every month, I pay $3.99 to “the cloud.” Crazy right? A cloud? Sounds like it should be free. A couple of times a year, I get so annoyed about this Apple cash grab that I try to detangle my digital life from it. I hit “cancel subscription.” An ominous red cloud symbol with a warning about limited storage pops up. I lose my nerve and close the window. I guess I’ll keep the cloud.

The cloud holds so much of our lives: decades of photos, hours of home videos, calendars that sync automatically, lists that send location-based reminders and music, so much music. Even this editorial lives on the cloud – that’s how I shared it with the rest of our team and our designers before going to print. The cloud is so convenient!

The problem is that calling it “the cloud” makes it seem free (I wish) and transcendent (it’s not). The cloud is an earthly, costly thing made up of fibre cables and computer chips. It exists, along with the rest of the internet, in nondescript buildings all over the world, sitting on land and tapping into power grids. These data centres are more concentrated in some places than others, like Ashburn, Virginia, which claims its 150+ data centres move as much as 70 percent of the internet’s traffic. Canada’s biggest data center hubs are Toronto and Montreal (where CC’s website is housed). More than a year ago, Alberta launched a campaign to bring 100 billion dollars of data centre investment to their province to meet the increased demand that has come with the AI revolution. Out of 39 new data centre proposals in the province, only two have been approved, and the rest have been told “there’s not enough power.”

The AI footprint

When I told Michael Krakowiak, CC’s web developer, what I was writing about this month, he confirmed that it’s reasonable to be concerned about AI’s electricity consumption.

“Using AI for a single query typically consumes about 10 times as much energy as a good old web search,” he wrote. “I think this new demand for power may accelerate the development of new power generation technologies or the use of green energy sources.”

ChatGPT3 consumes a 500-millilitre bottle of water for every 10-50 medium-length response to user prompts.

I hope he’s right. He reminded me that CC’s website, since it’s hosted in Quebec, is almost entirely powered by renewable energy. The same goes for data centers hosted in hydroelectric powerhouse provinces like B.C., Manitoba and Newfoundland. Which is great!

But that doesn’t account for the water being used to cool these supercomputers. Michael shared a research paper with me that says ChatGPT3 consumes a 500-millilitre bottle of water for every 10-50 medium-length responses to user prompts. The authors write: “The global AI demand is projected to account for 4.2 – 6.6 billion cubic meters of water withdrawal in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of 4 – 6 Denmark[s] or half of the United Kingdom.”

A leap of faith

Yet it seems that the people investing in AI development, like Elon Musk, have a single-minded commitment to maximize the new technology’s potential regardless of the ecological footprint or cost. In total, the world’s biggest tech companies spent more than 400 billion dollars on AI in 2025.

“There’s something almost religious about all of this,” says investigative reporter and co-creator of the Search Engine podcast, Sruthi Pinnamaneni. “Our tech moguls have developed faith, faith and a vision for tomorrow where intelligence knows no limit. Where we will one day harness the power of the sun to feed a machine god that we have created.”

In her report, she interviews finance reporter Miles Kruppa, who puts it this way: “We are deep into the biggest technology arms race in the world and Elon Musk sees no option other than getting these chips as fast as he can to basically build what amounts to a digital god that some of the smartest people in tech think has infinite commercial potential.”

I agree with these two reporters. I think what our technology moguls are doing (and what any of us are doing, if we’re investing time and money into AI) is taking a leap of faith. That’s not inherently a bad thing. But we need to be honest that what we’re doing isn’t backed by data. We don’t know for sure that AI is going to make our world better. It could be that in 800 years, historians look back and describe data centers as monuments to human ego and reckless spending.

If AI is the God . . .

All of this reminds me of medieval cathedrals. About 800 years ago in the region around Paris, France, the pursuit of stacking stone on top of stone and engineering unearthly arches became an obsession of the elite. Between 1100 and 1250, more than 20 percent of the economy of that small region was focused on building more than a thousand cathedrals. Do you know what else was happening in that 150-year span? Unimaginable plague and famine. While the poor worked on these sites, paid tithes and struggled to find enough food, the nobility were dead set on building something that could reach the clouds. And all for what?

If AI is the god, the cables and chips are the cathedral. What does that make the religion that Elon Musk and the rest of them are pursuing? I’m not sure if it has a name. But when I look at what the book of James has to say about the type of religion that our Creator God accepts as good and true, it’s got nothing to do with maximizing human intelligence or pushing the bounds of engineering.

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world,” writes James. That’s it. If AI isn’t helping us take care of orphans and widows, what good is it? I join Rudy Eikelboom in his call for “wisdom as the AI world develops.” Our world doesn’t need more cathedrals; it needs more Christ-like servants.