What Kind of World Are We Building?

Artificial Intelligence, Data Centers, and the Choice Between Empire and Shalom

Peter T. Brandt · SeePhas.com · June 2026

Part 1 — The Two Futures

Every society tells itself a story about what progress means.

Sometimes that story is explicit. More often it is embedded in the decisions people make, the incentives they create, and the outcomes they reward.

The debate surrounding artificial intelligence is usually presented as a debate about technology.

Will AI take our jobs?

Will it cause serious harm?

Are we inside a financial bubble that will eventually collapse?

These are important questions. They deserve careful answers.

But beneath them lies a much older question.

What kind of world are we building?

That question has always had more than one answer. Not simply different technologies or political systems, but fundamentally different ways of organizing human life—different answers to who matters, whose costs count, who benefits, and who gets to decide.

This article began as a study of AI data centers. But the deeper I investigated, the larger the questions became.

What is actually being built—and at what scale?

Who pays for the infrastructure it requires?

Who benefits from the wealth it generates?

What happens to the communities that host it?

Who decided all of this—and were the people most affected ever meaningfully included?

These are not primarily technical or economic questions. They are questions about power, responsibility, stewardship, and ultimately about what we owe one another.

Questions like these require a framework. Not simply an economic model or a policy checklist, but a way of evaluating whether the systems we build move people and communities toward greater flourishing.

The framework I use here emerged from an unexpected convergence of two independent lines of inquiry.

The first is the science of human flourishing, drawing from psychology, sociology, economics, public policy, and related disciplines to understand what helps people and communities thrive.

The second is religion and scripture—particularly the Hebrew and Christian traditions—which ask many of the same questions from a theological perspective. I have spent more than two decades studying both, including my current theological work in seminary. I also recognize that many other religious, spiritual, and indigenous traditions have developed profound understandings of human flourishing. Exploring those more deeply remains an important next step.

What surprised me was not how different these two streams of thought were, but how often they arrived at the same destination. The conditions identified by flourishing science and those described in the Hebrew scriptural tradition are remarkably similar: belonging, purpose, right relationship, stewardship, justice, community, participation, and care for creation.

Throughout this article I use two terms as shorthand for these contrasting ways of organizing society: shalom and empire.

Shalom is the Hebrew word the scriptural tradition uses to describe a world as God intends it—a society where people, communities, and creation flourish together through justice, right relationship, stewardship, peace, and shared well-being. I use the term not to impose a religious framework or proselytize, but because it is the most precise word I have found for what both flourishing science and the scriptural tradition consistently point toward.

Conversely, I use empire in its modern theological sense. While contemporary discussions often describe these dynamics as systems, power structures, institutions, or extractive economies, empire describes the recurring pattern of organizing society around the concentration of power, wealth, and control rather than around broad human flourishing. It emerged from the scriptural critique of historical empires such as Egypt, Babylon, and Rome—not simply as nations, but as recurring patterns of domination, exploitation, and economic extraction. Although scripture never presents a formal theory of empire, modern theologians have drawn these recurring themes together into a broader analytical framework. That is the sense in which I use the term here. It is not a label for any particular nation, political movement, corporation, or institution.

Together, shalom and empire provide a lens for evaluating the choices, institutions, and systems that shape our common life.

Two Ways of Organizing Society

Every society answers the same fundamental questions. What is wealth for? Who benefits? Who bears the costs? How should power be exercised? What obligations do we owe one another?

The two frameworks offer different answers.

Question	empire	shalom
Purpose of society	Increase power, wealth, and security.	Cultivate the flourishing of people, communities, and creation.
View of people	Resources to be utilized.	Persons of inherent dignity.
Wealth	Accumulate and protect.	Steward and share for the common good.
Power	Concentrate and control.	Serve, participate, and remain accountable.
Costs	Often shifted onto others.	Made visible and shared fairly.
Community	Means to an end.	Something to strengthen and sustain.
Creation	Resource to extract.	Gift to steward.
Success	Growth, efficiency, accumulation.	Flourishing, justice, healthy relationships, long-term well-being.

These are ideal types, not absolutes. Every nation, corporation, community, church, and individual reflects characteristics of both. The question is not whether a society perfectly embodies one or the other, but which direction it is moving.

The remainder of this article applies this framework to one of the largest infrastructure transformations in American history.

The central questions remain simple.

Who benefits?

Who bears the costs?

What is extracted?

What is restored?

Who participates in the decisions?

Does this move people, communities, and creation toward greater flourishing?

These questions are not abstract. They have concrete answers.

The story begins in one community.

But it is being repeated across the country.

Part 2 — Boxtown

The framework is easy to discuss in theory. The challenge is recognizing it in practice.

Boxtown sits in southwest Memphis, Tennessee. Founded in 1863 by formerly enslaved people, it has spent generations living alongside industrial development. Residents are familiar with promises of jobs, investment, and economic growth. They are also familiar with the costs that often accompany those promises.

In the summer of 2024, residents began noticing a smell. Then the noise — a low industrial rumble that did not stop at night. Then came reports of headaches, burning eyes, and concerns about worsening asthma symptoms in children. Most importantly, residents began asking a simple question: What is happening? Many did not know.

What had appeared in just 122 days inside a former appliance factory was one of the most powerful artificial-intelligence computing facilities in the world. The company was xAI. The owner was Elon Musk.

There was no public hearing before construction began. No community notification. No environmental review. When investigators later flew drones over the facility, they counted 35 methane gas turbines operating without a single air permit — emitting formaldehyde and nitrogen oxides into a community that already carried one of the worst air quality burdens in Tennessee. The Shelby County Health Department found no environmental concerns and issued permits. The Air Pollution Control Board voted 6-1 to let them stand.

The economics revealed a different kind of asymmetry. xAI purchased electricity from the local utility at the industrial rate of $64 per megawatt-hour. The residents of Boxtown paid $122 — nearly double — for the same grid.

When the EPA eventually ruled that xAI’s turbines violated the Clean Air Act, the ruling came with no enforcement mechanism and no penalties. What the public later learned was that during the period those turbines were running without permits, the man who owned xAI was simultaneously serving as a senior advisor to the executive branch — with influence over the agencies whose job it was to hold his company accountable. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found his dual roles created conflicts that “pose grave risks for America’s most sacred institutions and may violate federal law.”

“The damage was done before we knew about it.” — Darryl Sledge, Boxtown resident of more than fifty years

The deeper significance of Boxtown is that the story feels increasingly familiar. Across the country, communities are telling similar stories — projects negotiated before public awareness, promises emphasized while costs remain uncertain, benefits concentrated among owners and investors, costs and risks distributed among communities, ratepayers, taxpayers, and future generations.

The pattern appears in Virginia, where data centers now consume 26 percent of the entire state’s electricity and resident utility bills have risen 267 percent in five years. In Maricopa County, Arizona, where residential developers must prove a 100-year groundwater supply before building a single home while 48 data center campuses in the same county draw millions of gallons from the same aquifer under industrial permits requiring no public hearing. In Richland Parish, Louisiana, where a facility under construction will consume 23 million gallons of water per day in a parish where one in four residents lives in poverty.

Boxtown matters because it helps reveal the question beneath the project itself. Not whether artificial intelligence is useful. Not whether data centers should exist. But whether the people affected by these developments are participants in the process or merely resources within it.

That distinction sits at the center of the difference between empire and shalom.

Part 3 — We Have Seen This Before

The story of Boxtown may feel new. Artificial intelligence is new. The scale of the computing infrastructure is new. The technologies are new. But the underlying questions are not.

Throughout history, societies have repeatedly encountered transformative technologies and economic opportunities that promised extraordinary benefits. Many of those promises were real. Many changed the world. The challenge was rarely the technology itself. The challenge was how it was developed, who controlled it, who benefited from it, and who paid the costs.

The Railroads (1850–1871)

Railroads transformed nineteenth-century America. They connected markets, accelerated industrialization, and helped create the modern economy. They also became one of the largest public-private wealth transfers in American history.

Private railroad companies received approximately 180 million acres of public land — an area larger than Texas — plus $64.6 million in federal loans. At current western land values, those 180 million acres are worth between $180 billion and $900 billion today. The railroads were built, which was genuine. But the land was speculated rather than settled, freight rates were manipulated, and the enrichment of Stanford, Huntington, Gould, and Vanderbilt defined the Gilded Age.

The Oil Depletion Allowance (1926–Present)

The oil depletion allowance was set at 27.5 percent of gross revenue in 1926 — meaning oil companies could deduct more than a quarter of every dollar of oil revenue from their taxable income, regardless of actual costs. At its peak, some oil companies paid effective federal tax rates of 5 to 10 percent while other American businesses paid 52 percent. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau called it in 1937 ‘perhaps the most glaring loophole’ in the tax code. President Franklin Roosevelt decried it. President Truman tried to repeal it. Congress refused every time. The cumulative benefit to the oil and gas industry since inception exceeds $480 billion. Today the depletion allowance remains in the tax code as part of a broader fossil fuel subsidy package that — following new provisions added by Congress in 2025 — now costs taxpayers an estimated $35 billion annually, more than double the 2017 level. The oil industry spent hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations to secure those new provisions. We have now been paying the oil industry to exist for a century.

The Internet (1969–1995)

The internet was built on $124.5 million in documented public investment — worth approximately $275 million today — plus decades of military and university research that produced TCP/IP, packet-switching, DNS, and the browser itself. It was privatized in 1995 with zero conditions, zero public equity stake, and zero governance rights retained for the public that funded it. The companies built on that foundation now carry a combined market capitalization exceeding $10 trillion. The public’s share: zero.

The Broadcast Spectrum (1996)

The 1996 broadcast spectrum giveaway handed $70 billion in 1996 dollars — $140 billion today — in public airwave value to existing broadcasters for free. The promised $550 billion in consumer savings never arrived. Cable rates rose. The industry lost 500,000 jobs. The six corporations that received the gift and now own 90 percent of major American media are not highly profitable empires — they are in structural decline, losing viewers to streaming at nearly 10 percent annually, cutting workforces, and struggling to survive the digital transition they never saw coming. The public received nothing from the gift and now bears the costs of the industry’s contraction too.

Two International Episodes

The pattern is not uniquely American. In Russia, between 1991 and 1997 — six years — the collapse of the Soviet state enabled a handful of insiders to acquire controlling stakes in the country’s most valuable enterprises through voucher privatization. Citizens entitled to shares in state enterprises sold them for the equivalent of a few dollars amid 2,508 percent annual hyperinflation. Insiders bought them for pennies, then used them to acquire oil fields, gas pipelines, and banks worth hundreds of billions at world market prices. The total wealth transferred is estimated at $300 to $500 billion in today’s dollars. Harvard economist Marshall Goldman called it “one of the world’s greatest transfers of wealth.”

In colonial India, between 1765 and 1900 — 135 years — Britain extracted wealth through land taxes, forced exports, and trade terms designed to strip India of its productive income while enriching British shareholders. The mechanism was not only military conquest. Colonial policy forced India to continue exporting food even during active famines. Historians estimate that between 30 and 100 million people died of starvation in policy-induced famines during the late 19th century — more, in the period from 1881 to 1920 alone, than in all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and North Korea combined. Historian Mike Davis characterized British imperial food policy as ‘the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.’ Colonial administrators were fully aware of the consequences. They did not change course. Oxfam calculated the total extraction at $64.82 trillion in today’s dollars. It left India among the poorest nations on earth.

AI Is the Same — and Different

The data center buildout differs from both in ways that are neither reassuring nor exculpatory. Russia’s oligarchs captured assets that already existed. Britain’s colonizers extracted through military force. What is happening in the United States is more subtle: assets are being created with public investment and ongoing costs captured as they are built. The public pays but has nothing to show for it — no ownership, no guaranteed benefits. This is remarkable in a constitutional democracy, without a single law passed or a single vote taken. The communities bear the cost without being asked. They were simply never asked.

Part 4 — The Return of Extraction

The scale of the infrastructure being built is extraordinary. The potential benefits are extraordinary. The concern is not what is being built. The concern is how it is being built.

Over the past several decades, businesses, governments, investors, and communities have increasingly recognized that major projects create consequences beyond the profits they generate — consequences that must be planned for and paid for by those who create them. Infrastructure has costs. Environmental impacts have costs. Communities bear costs. Future generations bear costs. As a result, many business organizations have gradually moved toward broader forms of stewardship — identifying the costs created by a project, planning for them, and ensuring they are borne by those who receive the benefits.

That is not radical. It is responsible management. It is the opposite of extraction.

Yet many aspects of the current AI buildout appear to be moving in the opposite direction. Electricity costs are shifted onto ratepayers. Infrastructure costs are shifted onto taxpayers. Water consumption is absorbed by communities. Environmental impacts are often minimized, deferred, or excluded from economic calculations. Regulatory safeguards are treated as obstacles to be navigated rather than protections to be respected. Benefits remain concentrated. Costs become distributed.

The pattern is extraction — the way of empire.

The Accounting

Every large data center runs on two sets of books. The first is what the company chooses to report. The second is the full accounting that appears when every cost is assigned to the party that actually causes it and derives the benefits.

In Europe, many of the costs excluded from American data center corporate accounting would be required to appear on the Profit and Loss statement — grid upgrade costs, environmental burden, water consumption. In the United States, they are not. So the companies build here.

A representative 500-megawatt facility — comparable to the hyperscale AI campuses now being built across the country — requires approximately $4.2 billion in initial construction and equipment investment. It generates annual revenue of roughly $2.2 billion and reports annual operating costs of $1.73 billion, producing a reported net profit of approximately $490 million — a 22 percent margin. That is what the company reports. When every cost is assigned to the party that causes it — the ratepayer absorbing grid charges, the taxpayer funding exemptions, the family whose water table is dropping, the generation inheriting a worse climate — the same facility transfers between $150 million and $805 million per year of additional costs onto the public. The central estimate is $360 million of additional costs per facility per year. These costs never appear on any corporate Profit and Loss. They appear instead in someone else’s utility bill, tax assessment, and lungs.

Multiplied across the decade-long buildout, the total transfer of costs from corporate ledgers onto communities runs from $0.7 trillion to $3.6 trillion, with a central estimate near $2.3 trillion — larger than the annual GDP of Italy and exceeding the sum of every comparable public wealth transfer in American history combined.

Who Is Collecting

This cost transfer does not disappear into abstraction. It has beneficiaries.

Five individuals in particular stand to benefit most directly.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s largest individual shareholder, holds a stake currently worth $243 to $290 billion.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s largest shareholder, holds a stake of approximately $217 billion.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder, holds a stake of $165 to $181 billion — and Nvidia manufactures the GPU chips that every AI data center requires.

Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, holds approximately 40 percent of Oracle, a stake worth $233 to $258 billion.

And Elon Musk, whose net worth reached $1.1 trillion following SpaceX’s IPO in June 2026, is simultaneously the owner of one of the largest AI data center operations in the country and a former senior advisor to the executive branch — with influence over the agencies responsible for regulating his own company.

These are not hired executives doing their jobs. They are founder-owners whose personal fortunes compound directly with every facility built and every public cost absorbed. Their combined net worth is approximately $2.0 trillion. Without reform, they stand to capture up to $660 billion of the estimated $2.3 trillion in public cost transfer over the next decade — nearly one dollar in three flowing from American communities into the personal fortunes of five people who are already among the wealthiest human beings who have ever lived.

The concern is not that a handful of people may become extraordinarily wealthy. That has happened before. The concern is that the costs associated with creating that wealth may increasingly be borne by people who never agreed to the arrangement.

That is not an accounting question — that just quantifies it. It is a stewardship question. Who benefits? Who pays? And are those two things aligned? If they are not, then the issue is not simply artificial intelligence. It is whether we are building systems organized around stewardship — or returning to systems organized around extraction.

Part 5 — What Would Shalom Require?

The issue is not whether artificial intelligence should be developed. The issue is not whether data centers should be built. The issue is not whether investors should earn returns. The difference is not what gets built. The difference is how.

Throughout this article I have argued that many aspects of the current AI buildout appear to follow a familiar pattern:

• Benefits becoming concentrated

• Costs becoming distributed

• Decisions becoming centralized

• Communities not informed until after critical commitments have already been made

That is the pattern of extraction. Shalom points in a different direction. Because it insists that benefits, responsibilities, risks, and costs remain aligned.

Extractive Pattern (Empire)	Stewardship Pattern (Shalom)
Velocity — Decide first, seek consent later	Engagement — Engage stakeholders before commitments are made
Opacity — Obscure ownership, incentives, and accountability	Transparency — Make ownership, incentives, and accountability visible
Misrepresentation — Overstate benefits while minimizing costs and risks	Honesty — Present benefits, costs, and risks truthfully
Political Capture — Use influence and access to secure favorable outcomes from public officials	Trustworthiness — Public officials are accountable and earn support and trust through transparency with their constituents
Legal Overwhelm — Outpace communities through scale, speed, and legal resources	Participation — Ensure communities can meaningfully participate
Regulatory Avoidance — Treat safeguards as obstacles to be bypassed	Respect — Treat safeguards as protections for the common good
Cost Shifting — Externalize costs onto others	Responsibility — Internalize and bear increased costs directly
Wealth Extraction — Concentrate benefits among owners	Fairness — Align benefits, responsibilities, risks, and rewards
Resource Exploitation — Treat land, water, and communities as inputs to be used	Stewardship — Treat land, water, and communities as assets held in trust
Build Fast — Ask ‘How quickly can we build?’	Build Wisely — Ask ‘Should we build? How should we build?’

Notice that none of these differences concern technology. The servers are the same. The software is the same. The data centers are the same. The difference lies in the relationships surrounding them — who participates, who decides, who benefits, who bears the costs.

A Shalom Data Center

A shalom-oriented data center is not anti-technology. It is technology governed by stewardship. It would still require large amounts of capital. It would still attract investors. It would still create jobs. It would still generate profits. The difference is not whether value is created. The difference is how value is created — and how the associated responsibilities are handled.

Working models already exist. The European Union’s binding framework requires climate neutrality by 2030, mandatory public energy reporting, and real water recycling standards — not voluntary pledges. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a community benefits agreement delivered $10 million each for economic development and climate goals before a single permit was signed. Ohio requires data centers to pay for 85 percent of subscribed electrical capacity regardless of consumption — preventing residential ratepayers from subsidizing industrial computing. In Illinois, proposed legislation would require cumulative environmental impact assessments and legally binding community benefits agreements before approval.

These are not utopian proposals. They are operating models. They demonstrate that the choice between empire and shalom in data center development is not theoretical. It is being made — in specific places, by specific people, right now. But not uniformly in the United States.

A shalom-oriented data center would make ownership, incentives, and public support transparent. Communities would be engaged before major commitments were made. Infrastructure requirements would be planned for rather than transferred. Environmental impacts would be measured, disclosed, and mitigated. Benefits, responsibilities, costs, risks, and rewards would remain aligned. The project would be evaluated not only by profitability, but by whether it contributes to the flourishing of the people, communities, and environments it affects.

That is the difference between empire and shalom. And it is the choice now sitting before us.

Part 6 — Why I Trust This Framework

Throughout this article, I have used the framework of shalom to evaluate the AI buildout and the choices surrounding it. The framework I trust is not one I invented. It emerged from a convergence.

The first source is the record of Scripture — the instructions provided to humanity, the stories of people, communities, and nations moving toward or away from the life God intended, the witness of prophets, poets, sages, and teachers wrestling with what it means to live well before God and one another. And within that same continuing story, the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth — the fullest revelation of what shalom in human form looks like.

The second source is the science of human flourishing. My own journey did not begin with shalom. It began with a simpler question: What actually helps human beings flourish? That question eventually grew into the SeePhas Flourishing Journey and led me into economics, psychology, sociology, public policy, history, theology, and the science of human flourishing.

The more I studied flourishing, the more I encountered the same themes: healthy relationships, belonging, meaning, purpose, trust, justice, stewardship, and participation in community. And the more I studied those themes, the more I found myself returning to the same conclusion: the science of human flourishing and the record of Scripture were pointing toward the same reality.

The Scriptural word most closely associated with that reality is shalom — a world functioning as intended, characterized by right relationship between people, creation, and God.

When Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of God, he spoke of caring for the poor, liberating the oppressed, welcoming outsiders, challenging systems of domination, rejecting violence, and loving even one’s enemies. When Jesus acted, he consistently moved toward those with the least power. He treated people not as resources to be used, but as image-bearers to be loved. He was not introducing a new vision for humanity. He was revealing what life under the reign of God looks like.

I trust this framework because it consistently points toward life. Toward flourishing. Toward healthier people, stronger communities, the care of creation, and what I believe is God’s intention for the world. That does not mean every question has an easy answer. It does mean that when I encounter competing visions of society, I have a standard by which to evaluate them. For me, that standard is shalom.

Part 7 — The Commons Are Not Free

This article began with data centers. It ends somewhere much larger.

Every generation inherits things it did not create: clean air, water, public infrastructure, stable institutions, community trust, and the natural systems that sustain life itself. These are not free inputs. They are inheritances. They are part of what has traditionally been called the commons.

The commons are not free. Someone paid for them. Someone cared for them. Someone preserved them. The question is whether we will do the same.

The debate surrounding artificial intelligence is ultimately larger than technology. The question is not whether AI becomes powerful. It likely will. The question is whether we possess the wisdom to govern that power in ways that serve people, communities, and creation rather than merely extracting from them.

One path concentrates benefits and distributes costs. The other seeks to align benefits, responsibilities, risks, and rewards. One follows the logic of empire. The other follows the logic of shalom.

The technologies may be new. The question is ancient.

Who benefits?

Who pays?

What kind of world are we building?

The answers will shape far more than the future of artificial intelligence. They will help determine the future we leave to one another.

Part 8 — What Can You Do?

The resistance to the data center buildout is not being led by lawyers, lobbyists, or national organizations. It is being led by people who live near these facilities — people who showed up to meetings, read contracts their officials couldn’t share, organized their neighbors, and in hundreds of cases changed the outcome.

You can be one of them.

Find Your Local Group

The Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development maintains a database of active opposition groups across all 49 states. If a group exists near you, they need people. If one doesn’t, the database can help you start one. Start at datacenterresponsibility.com.

Know Before It’s Too Late

The single most important thing communities can do is engage before permits are signed. The pattern documented in Boxtown, in Louisiana, in Virginia — where communities discovered what was being built only after the fact — is not inevitable. Every community has the right to request public disclosure before approval. The organizations below can help you exercise that right.

Track What Is Happening

Data Center Watch, run by 10a Labs, publishes open monthly data on blocked projects and active opposition groups. It is the most comprehensive public database of the resistance. Find it at datacenters.tenalabs.com.

Connect with the Broader Movement

MediaJustice, the NAACP’s Stop Dirty Data Centers campaign, and the Athena Coalition coordinate at the national level, with particular focus on communities bearing disproportionate environmental and economic burdens.

Ask Your Elected Officials Five Questions

Was this deal negotiated under a nondisclosure agreement?

What are the full terms of any tax exemption or abatement?

Who bears the cost of grid upgrades required by this facility?

What water reporting requirements apply?

Was there a community benefits agreement — and if not, why not?

These are not radical questions. They are the questions any responsible official should be able to answer. If they cannot — or will not — that is itself important information.

For Those Working Within a Faith Community

The shalom framework is not a personal ethic alone. It is a communal one. Faith communities have historically been among the most effective advocates for community accountability — not because they oppose development, but because they understand that the purpose of economic life is human flourishing, not extraction. Your congregation, your denomination, your network may already have relationships with the communities most affected. Use them.

Peter T. Brandt writes for SeePhas.com

Full analysis, detailed Profit and Loss model, and source documentation available at SeePhas.com.