Our Digital Moai

The Silent, Towering Costs of AI

They stand silent on the slopes of a remote island, stone giants staring out at an empty sea. The Moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are marvels of human ingenuity and devotion, a testament to a society’s capacity for immense, coordinated effort. They are also silent witnesses to a catastrophic collapse. The society that carved them, that poured its identity, resources, and labour into their creation, seemingly sacrificed its very future for them.

Today, our monuments are less tangible than stone, but no less massive. They are the sprawling, humming, and voraciously hungry data centres that power artificial intelligence. To their builders, they are the pinnacle of our achievement, the foundation of a future defined by limitless progress. But if we listen closely, past the utopian promises of Silicon Valley, we can hear a warning echoing from the shores of Rapa Nui. Our digital Moai are being erected at a staggering dollar, human, and ecological cost—and we are refusing to see the cliff edge we are racing towards.

The construction of the Moai was a symptom, not the cause, of the disease. It represented a society’s totalising focus on a single form of prestige and power, a cultural obsession that required the felling of entire forests to transport the monolithic statues. This deforestation led to soil erosion, the collapse of biodiversity, and ultimately, the starvation and warfare that decimated the Rapa Nui people. They likely didn’t see the last tree for the statues.

Are we any different?

The AI industry is powered by data centres that consume biblical amounts of energy and water. A single query to a generative AI model can use nearly ten times the electricity of a simple Google search. Globally, the electricity consumption of data centres is projected to more than double by 2026, surpassing the entire energy use of countries like France. In Canada, where some pride themselves on their climate commitments, the race to build these facilities threatens to derail our goals, with some projections showing that new data centres could force provinces to rely more heavily on fossil fuels, effectively wiping out hard-won emissions reductions.

This insatiable thirst extends to water. Billions of litres of fresh water are required to cool these computational behemoths, diverting a precious resource from communities and ecosystems already under strain from a worsening climate crisis. We are, in essence, draining our digital island’s resources to power our statues.

But the cost is not just ecological. The great stone heads of Rapa Nui required the immense physical labour of their people. Our digital Moai are also built on the backs of a vast, hidden workforce—one located primarily in the Global South.

Beneath AI's sleek, automated façade lies a sprawling human infrastructure of “ghost workers.” Millions of people in countries like Kenya, the Philippines, and India perform the gruelling, low-paid data annotation and content moderation labour. These are the digital carvers, meticulously labelling images and text to train AI models, or shielding users from the internet's most toxic content by viewing it themselves.

Reports have exposed a grim reality: workers are paid less than $2 an hour, face precarious employment with no benefits, and suffer significant psychological trauma. This is the dark underbelly of the AI revolution, a system of digital colonialism that concentrates wealth and power in the Global North while outsourcing the human and environmental damage to the South. It is an extractive logic as old as empire, repackaged in the language of innovation.

Just as the Rapa Nui chiefs likely celebrated each new, larger Moai, our tech titans celebrate every bigger, more powerful AI model. The colossal sums of money, the brightest minds of a generation, and our planet’s finite resources are being poured into this singular pursuit. We are told it is for the good of humanity, that this is the only path to progress.

However, a critical and honest accounting is long overdue. Could this immense allocation of capital and intellect not be better utilised to address the crises that AI is exacerbating—climate change, resource scarcity, and global inequality?

The Rapa Nui left us a haunting lesson carved in stone. Their statues were a cultural apex, but also a symbol of unsustainable choices, of a society so fixated on its symbols of status that it failed to protect its foundations.

We must now look at the humming, windowless data centres rising in our communities and worldwide and ask ourselves the hard questions. What are we sacrificing for these digital giants? Whose labour are they built on? Whose water are they drinking? And when we have strip-mined our planet for the energy and materials to power them, who will be left to admire their cleverness?

It is time to demand transparency, accountability, and a radical shift in direction. We need sustainable AI, fair labour practices throughout the entire AI supply chain, and a public, democratic conversation about the kind of future we are building. Otherwise, our magnificent digital Moai will become our legacy—towering monuments to our own brilliant, self-inflicted demise, standing silent watch over a world we chose not to save.