Against the Tulip Economy: An Ecosocialist Programme for AI and Data Centres

Why ‘against’ is never enough: from Brick Lane to a Senedd briefing that can’t source its own figures

Sep 04, 2026

Monday’s final plenary at the summer school of ACR (Anti-Capitalist Resistance, the England and Wales organisation of the Fourth International) in Suffolk closed on data centres, and I said there what needs saying here. Nobody at the tech conference I was at a few months ago, not the institutional investors, not the forecasters, can defend the data centre boom. It is, to use the phrase I reached for on the day, ‘this bizarre tulip economy about building data centres.’ The reference is to tulip mania, the Dutch bulb-trading bubble of the 1630s, when a single rare tulip bulb could trade for more than a skilled craftsman earned in a decade before the market collapsed within weeks. Run the industry’s own ten and twenty year forecasts out to their most extreme demand scenario and the world already has as much computing capacity as it needs.

Pete had asked the obvious question a few minutes earlier: some comrades at another summer school this year took the view that the right response to a data centre is to burn it down, so what did the panel think of that. My answer wasn’t a defence of the hardware. It was that the waste is real and the argument still has to end up somewhere programmatic, because a demand that stops at ‘no data centres’ can’t be built on, and a demand built on ‘why do we need this one’ can.

The clearest illustration I gave on Monday wasn’t Wales, it was Brick Lane. A data centre proposed for one of the hottest, most water-stressed sites in London, which I called on the day ‘the most insane place in the world to put a data centre,’ makes no sense as a computing decision and total sense as a financial one: it sits close enough to the City, London’s financial district, that ‘milliseconds are worth millions’ to the high-frequency trading firms it serves. Chapelhall and Dunfermline are the same story without even that excuse. Scotland already has more computing capacity than it needs, and the data centres being built around the two towns is, in my own phrase from the plenary, ‘a plank of public sector love for business’ rather than a response to any social requirement at all.

Four days later, Cymru’n Codi (Welsh for roughly ‘Wales rising’), a Welsh political organising group, published a comment on their Substack that could have been drafted from the same argument without ever having heard it: megawatts, acreages, the difference between a moratorium and a review, closing with a list of conditions no data centre developer in Cymru is currently required to meet.

Wales now has Artificial Intelligence Growth Zones, AIGZs, UK Government-designated areas where planning and grid connection are fast-tracked for AI infrastructure investment, across the north and south of the country, and since May a Plaid Cymru-led government has backed them as hard as Westminster does. Adam Price MS, Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy since 13 May, told the CBI in his first public remarks in the job that Wales wants to be one of the easiest places in Britain to invest, planning and grid connection cleared by government rather than contested by communities. A party that spent a generation arguing devolution meant Wales deciding its own future is now the government clearing the path for capital to decide what gets built on it.

Cymru’n Codi’s own figures put a number on the same waste I described from Brick Lane and Scotland, and the topline ones check out. Wales had 154MW of data centre capacity in 2024, the highest outside London, against London’s 1,048MW, both figures from DSIT, the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, confirmed in the Senedd’s own research briefing of 31 July. The Senedd, Wales’s parliament, calculates the UK Government’s own projection for the South Wales AIGZ alone, over 1GW by the early 2030s, at thirteen per cent of Wales’s entire 2024 electricity capacity, none of it answering a computing need that the industry’s own forecasters, on Monday’s evidence, don’t believe exists either.

The site-by-site figures are shakier than the topline ones. Of the five megawattages in circulation, Cardiff twice, Newport, Bridgend, Anglesey, only two survive contact with a primary source: 148MW for the Newport campus run by Vantage, one of the world’s larger data centre operators, marketed confusingly as ‘Cardiff,’ and 349MW at the Anglesey site, which turns out on the planning documents to be battery storage rather than data centre compute at all. Newport’s 200MW, Bridgend’s 600MW and Cardiff’s second 150MW figure don’t appear in any planning application or AIGZ document a search could locate. They’re carried by the Senedd’s own briefing without a cited source, which means the number most likely to end up in every subsequent article about Wales’s AI boom, this one included, currently traces back to nothing sturdier than repetition.

‘Land and expand’ is a phrase used by Democracy for Sale, a British investigative newsletter, to describe how the tech firm Palantir won a £1 NHS contract in 2020 and turned it into a seven-year, £330 million one: get an initial foothold through, then make the next phase nearly impossible to refuse. Cymru’n Codi borrowed the same phrase for the fight in front of them. The applicant behind the proposed data centre at Mwyndy Cross, near Pontyclun, is Maska Group, a developer and asset manager with London and Manchester offices which trade press confirms has not previously built a data centre. Local reporting also names Talbot Green Developments in connection with the site, a company based in Aylesbury and ultimately owned in New Zealand, which is why one objection to the scheme wasn’t really about data centres at all: the profits, whatever they turn out to be, were never going to stay in Wales. That is not a detail. That is the entire economics of speculative infrastructure, stated plainly.

Red Mole’s own casebook on automation, drawn from seventy years of the press of the Fourth International, the international Trotskyist movement founded in 1938, and collected this year as Red Mole Guide 16, supplies the argument’s other half. Four times since 1954 the movement forecast what a new machine would do to work, from Lyn Marcus on the servomechanism to Winfried Wolf on the West German robots that could feel warm from cold, and every forecast was serious, well researched, and wrong about the outcome in one direction or the other. What decided the outcome was never in the forecast. It was whether the workers affected were organised to take the machine’s saved time as time.

Wolf’s 1984 report from Volkswagen is the clearest case. West German metalworkers, organised in IG Metall, the engineering and metalworking union, struck for seven weeks that year against robots that could replace between four and ten workers each. Under capitalism, he wrote, the gain from that machine arrives “as massive unemployment instead of a shorter workweek for all.” IG Metall’s strike didn’t stop the robots. It won a phased reduction in the working week instead, the one outcome across four forecasts that the Fourth International’s own record shows organisation actually secured.

The fourth forecast is being made now, and the casebook closes with the ecosocialist theses on AI of Daniel Tanuro, a Belgian agronomist and long-standing writer for the Fourth International’s press, published in International Viewpoint, the Fourth International’s English-language magazine, this February. Thesis 27 lands where every other document in the casebook lands: trade union veto over the introduction of AI at work, workers’ control over the workload, “reduction of working hours without loss of salary” against layoffs. That is the demand this piece has been building toward, and it belongs alongside the workers’ and community inquiry I argued for on Monday: not a survey after the planning decision, but a standing right to ask what a given piece of land is actually needed for before anyone builds on it, garden, housing, industry, whatever it turns out to be.

The obvious response is that public ownership settles the rest of it: expropriate the hyperscalers and the ecological question becomes a planning question, decided democratically instead of by a share price. But that isn’t quite right either. Thesis 32 refuses exactly that comfort. “Replacing capitalist property with collective ownership,” Tanuro writes, “in and of itself, would not be enough” to bring AI’s material footprint within what the planet can sustain. Public ownership answers who profits from the data centre. It does not answer how much throughput a plan is entitled to authorise once profit stops being the constraint, and Red Mole has not settled that question either.

The same evasion happens in the opposite direction too, and reading Eko’s own campaign page rather than the coverage of it makes the gap sharper, not softer. ‘Billionaires like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are racing to see who can conquer AI first,’ the pitch runs, promising to stop AI being used ‘just to make the rich even more filthy rich.’ Eko’s own tagline is ‘people and planet over profit.’ The demands that follow ask for safety standards, liability for AI companies, a ban on training AI on children, and a verifiable off-switch: matters of regulation and liability. Who owns the compute and who captures the profit, the target of three paragraphs of billionaire-baiting in the pitch itself, stays outside the list of six.

A sentence loose enough for Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and a signatory, to sign alongside a teachers’ union cannot by construction contain a class analysis, because naming one would cost half the signatories. One comrade at the same Monday plenary, unnamed in the transcript, warned that the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who argues democracy should be replaced by a form of corporate rule under a national CEO, are using AI to advance an anti-democratic political project that treats democracy itself as the obstacle. The Pro-Human AI Declaration is close to the mirror image: opposition to AI mobilised behind an answer decided before a single worker signed it, the anger real, the demand regulatory. It stood at 679,663 signatures when this was drafted, seventy thousand short of the round number the campaign is chasing, a serious figure for a petition and a modest one for a movement. Even inside the AI-safety milieu this isn’t landing as serious either. PauseAI, a campaign group pushing for a halt to frontier AI development, said the declaration ‘goes the way of crypto regulation, slow, reactive, captured by incumbents,’ a pattern no petition reverses.

Being against billionaires settles nothing on its own. The German socialist August Bebel called antisemitism ‘the socialism of fools’ for exactly this reason: a hatred of finance and ‘rapacious’ wealth that never touches capital as a social relation, only personalises it into a villain. Hitler’s National Socialism built an entire economic doctrine on the same move, splitting capital into schaffendes (productive, coded German) and raffendes (rapacious, coded Jewish) forms, and left German capital’s actual power completely intact while doing it. What replaces the billionaire, the market’s own discipline, the nation, or the working class, was always the only question that mattered, and it is the one question the declaration never asks.

Cymru’n Codi’s own conditions for the Senedd do something a national slogan can’t: they price the externality before construction starts rather than after, developer-funded rather than bill-funded, audited annually rather than taken on trust. The one thing missing from the list as published is enforcement with teeth: statutory inspection instead of self-certification, and a community’s right to walk the site with the inspector instead of reading the report afterwards. That, to be fair to Cymru’n Codi, is exactly the demand they end on.

None of this, Welsh, Scottish or English, touches the harder problem thesis 32 leaves standing. A planned economy still has to decide how much compute the world actually needs, not only who owns the servers that supply it, and nobody in this argument, Tanuro included, has said how a democratic plan sets that number rather than backing into it from whatever capacity already happens to exist. I said at Darsham that the AI question is at one level a totalising, existential one, closer to shouting at clouds than to leafleting outside a Tube station, and that the task is finding the agitational form underneath it. The workers’ and community inquiry is that form for the land. Nobody at the plenary, least of all me, had an answer for the form it takes for the compute itself.

Sources

The Pro-Human AI Declaration material (the pitch copy, the six demands, the signature count) is quoted directly from Eko’s own action page. The signature count (679,663) is a snapshot at the date the source material was supplied and will be stale by publication. The Bannon signatory claim and the Thiel/Yarvin/Andreessen characterisation are sourced to NBC News reporting and the Darsham transcript respectively.