I was at a family gathering not long ago, doing what I usually do — hanging out with my nieces. Two are teenagers, one is in her early twenties, and like most people their age, their phones might as well be surgically attached. They take thousands of photos and videos. So do their friends. They save, they share, they upload, they post. It's just what you do.

At one point, one of them got genuinely stressed. She'd run out of space on her Google account and didn't know what to do. She was asking her parents to buy more storage. The idea of deleting anything — a single photo, a random video, an old email — wasn't even on the table. Everything was worth keeping. Everything felt essential.

I watched this happen and my brain went somewhere different than hers. I wasn't thinking about which photos to keep. I was thinking about what it costs to store all of them. Not in dollars — in energy, in minerals, in physical space on a planet that doesn't have infinite room for our data.

This is where my head goes. It's probably not where yours goes, and I don't say that as a judgment. Most people don't look at a photo on a phone and see a data center. They see a memory. But I've spent most of my life working with technology — building it, understanding it, pulling it apart to see how it works. And once you've seen the machinery, you can't unsee it. Every time I watch someone scroll past a video, or upload a folder of images they'll never look at again, I think about the infrastructure required to make that possible. The servers. The cooling systems. The electricity. The mines where the materials come from.

Computing at the scale we've reached — billions of people generating trillions of pieces of data every day — requires resources that would stagger most people if they could see them. According to the International Energy Agency, data centers consumed roughly 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, which is about 1.5% of all electricity used globally. By 2025, that jumped to around 485 terawatt-hours — nearly 1.8% of the world's total. And it's accelerating. The sector is growing at about 12% per year, which is more than four times faster than the growth of total global electricity demand.

These aren't abstract numbers. They represent physical buildings, massive amounts of water for cooling, and power drawn from grids that also light homes and run hospitals. And the fastest-growing slice of this is AI. Electricity consumption from AI-focused data centers surged 50% in 2025 alone.

Because they don't know how to stop. That's the design.

The business model of Big Tech depends on more. More uploads, more streams, more searches, more posts, more data. Every quarter, shareholders expect growth. Revenue has to go up. Profit has to go up. The only way that happens is if people use more, store more, share more. The system doesn't have a setting for "enough." It only has "more."

And now AI is baked into everything. Every search, every photo edit, every suggested reply, every summary, every "helpful" automation. AI is the most energy-intensive technology most people interact with daily, and almost none of them know it. Training a single large language model like GPT-4 required between 51 and 62 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. That produced around 12,500 to 15,000 metric tonnes of CO₂ emissions — comparable to the lifetime emissions of over a thousand average American cars. And that's just the training. Every time you ask it a question, every time it generates a response, it draws power that has to come from somewhere. Usually from the same grid that powers homes and hospitals. The companies building these systems are constructing dedicated data centers just to keep up. Not to replace the old ones — to add to them.

This isn't abstract to me. I think about it when I see my wife scrolling through Instagram accounts for pets. I think about it when my nieces upload countless dance videos to TikTok. I want to be clear here: I'm not saying this behavior is meaningless. For them, it's about connection. It's about belonging. It's about documenting moments that feel important in the moment. I get that. I do. But I also see the cost that sits underneath it, and I can't ignore that either.

I have dogs I love more than I can put into words. I take pictures of them sometimes. I don't post them anywhere. When I'm with them, I'm with them. I don't feel the need to document their lives and broadcast them. I clean out my email and my storage regularly. I move old files to local drives instead of keeping everything in the cloud. Some people might read that and think it sounds self-righteous. I get that. But it doesn't come from a place of superiority. It comes from a place of inability to ignore what I know is happening.

When you understand the physical cost of data, holding onto ten thousand photos you'll never look at doesn't feel neutral anymore. It feels like something with a weight to it.

And here's the thing that sits heaviest with me: we are inseparable from this planet. There is no version of this where we exhaust the earth's resources and come out fine on the other side. Hurt the planet, hurt ourselves. That's not poetry. That's physics. The lithium and cobalt mined for new phones, the water consumed to cool server farms, the land cleared to build them — all of it comes from the same place we live. The same place our kids will live.

Consider the hardware itself. The UN's Global E-waste Monitor reported that the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022. By 2024, that was closer to 69 million tonnes. And it's projected to reach 82 million tonnes by 2030. The average lifespan of a device is now three to four years. Roughly 30 to 35% of all electronic products are discarded each year. That's not just waste piling up in landfills. That's the physical manifestation of a culture that treats expensive, resource-intensive machines as disposable.

I know what some of you are thinking. What about the businesses? The enterprises? The employees who need these tools to do their jobs? You're right — that's a massive part of the picture. And it's one we can't fix from the outside. We can't tell our employers to stop using cloud services. We can't demand that corporations change their infrastructure overnight. But we can raise the next generation of leaders, engineers, and decision-makers who think differently about these choices. We can teach our kids to ask the questions we weren't asked. That's where the leverage is.

So is all of this worth it? Ten thousand photos. A thousand videos of pets. AI writing emails we could write ourselves. Every convenience that requires a data center to maintain?

I don't think most people have ever been given the chance to answer that question honestly, because they've never been told what the question really is. They think they're choosing between posting and not posting. Between storing and deleting. Between using AI and typing their own words. They don't realize they're also choosing between that and the energy it takes to make it happen. Between that and the mineral that had to be mined. Between that and the river that got diverted to cool a server.

This is what I want the next generation to understand. Not that technology is evil. Not that they should never post a photo or use an AI tool. But that every digital action has a physical cost, and they deserve to know what it is before they make the choice. They should be able to ask themselves: do I really need this? Is this worth the energy it requires? And they should be able to answer that question with their eyes open.

We need less tech, less data, fewer devices. Not because technology itself is the enemy, but because the system that produces it has no brake pedal. The only brake is us. Our choices. Our willingness to say "enough" in a world that profits from us never saying it at all.

If we can raise a generation that understands this — not as guilt, not as fear, but as simple, honest awareness — then maybe some of them will let it change how they engage. Not all of them. Maybe not even most. But some. And some is where it starts.