Licensed to Loot – Big Finance, Big Tech and the AI Infrastructure Grab: I. Introduction: A manufactured market. The global race to build AI data centres is a manufactured investment cycle. Consumer demand did not create it and no credible case for economy-wide benefit underpins it. It is built by concentrated financial capital in alliance with dominant technology platforms, and kept going by governments willing to trade regulatory scrutiny for the appearance of growth. Speculative profit, political influence, and a small group of dominant firms have driven the pace and scale of the boom, while the environmental, social and financial costs have been pushed on to the public.

• The Balanced Economy Project’s report Too Big to Cool: How Financial Power Blocks Planet-friendly Action and How to Break lt shows how the growing size, concentration and political power of the financial sector are actively undermining efforts to tackle global warming. AI data centres are the latest and sharpest expression of that logic. They are the sharpest expression of a speculative strategy in which Big Finance and its highly financialised proxy Big Tech seek to expand profitability by manufacturing a market and then extracting returns while externalising costs.
• As Matt Seybold has observed in The American Vandal, the most powerful tech firms are framing AI adoption as an inevitability rather than a choice – insisting society must adopt a nascent technology that is the subject of trillion-dollar speculative bets. A titanic downpayment has been made on AI infrastructure presuming it will prove as transformative as the computer or the smartphone. It must, for the buildout to generate returns.
• This paper sets out how that process has worked, what it has produced, and what needs to happen now. The focus is primarily on the UK and EU, though the dynamics are global. The argument is that AI data centre expansion fits the pattern Too Big to Cool traces across financialised infrastructure: concentrated power manufacturing a market, capturing political institutions, and pushing the downside on to the public while keeping the gains private…”