Powering up to 945 TWh by 2030

Editor's note: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted as saying, "Cyber is a real domain of power," reflecting Israel's (the "6th eye") focus on cybersecurity as a strategic national capability. In the US, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former DHS Chief of Staff Chad Sweet, founded The Chertoff Group (includes data center security risk management), a private security and risk-management advisory firm that works with government agencies, defense companies, and critical infrastructure organizations. The firm's leadership has direct DHS experience, and The Chertoff Group has received a DHS SAFETY Act designation for its security risk-management methodology. Chertoff has also continued involvement with DHS through roles such as serving on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Chertoff, has professional ties to Israel through cybersecurity, technology, and security-sector relationships. Chertoff's documented connection to the USA PATRIOT Act is that, before becoming Secretary of Homeland Security, he served as Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division at the U.S. Department of Justice (2001–2003), where he helped develop and implement the Bush administration's post-9/11 counterterrorism policies and was involved in the drafting of the USA PATRIOT Act (it was drawn up well before the events of 9/11). The following republished information is a follow-up to yesterday's post on the rapid expansion of data center construction and the infrastructure demands behind the AI boom. 

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The Real Reason Behind Data Centers

By Elite Info News | May 27, 2026

Somewhere on the outskirts of a mid-sized American city, behind a fence of black steel and cameras with no visible brand markings, sits a building of tremendous and deliberate ordinaries. It has no windows. Its parking lot is half-empty. A low mechanical hum radiates through its cinder-block walls — the sound of ten thousand servers breathing in unison, drawing power and expelling heat in an endless industrial metabolism. Precision cooling systems push chilled air through raised floors at regulated temperatures. Indicator lights blink in rhythmic patterns across rack after rack of hardware, each unit quietly processing what the modern world has decided to call "the cloud." The air smells faintly of electricity. Nobody who does not need to be there ever is.

This is a data center. There are thousands of them scattered across the planet, from the suburbs of Northern Virginia — which alone handles an estimated 70 percent of global internet traffic exchange — to rural Oregon, to the outskirts of Dublin, to the industrial fringes of Singapore and Shanghai. Together they form the nervous system of modern civilization: the invisible backbone through which photographs are stored, financial transactions are cleared, social media posts are routed, and the streaming of films is made possible. They are, by virtually every official account, neutral utilities — the digital equivalent of water towers or electrical substations, serving the public interest without agenda or intent.

That account is not exactly wrong. But it is radically incomplete. Because beneath the mundane reality of cloud storage and content delivery lies a deeper architecture — one of surveillance, behavioral modeling, geopolitical weaponry, and monopolistic control — that has no real precedent in human history. Every WiFi signal, every connected device, every digital interaction feeds an ever-expanding network that quietly maps the movements, habits, purchasing behaviors, political sympathies, and intimate lives of billions of people. And the physical infrastructure enabling all of it — those vast, windowless buildings and their blinking lights — sits at the center of a power structure so entrenched, so profitable, and so deeply embedded in both government and corporate interest, that most of the public has never been invited to look directly at it.

This report invites you to look.

 

SECTION I: THE COVER STORY — WHAT WE'RE TOLD

The official narrative about data centers is not a lie — it is a carefully curated partial truth, polished to a consumer-friendly shine. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure together spend billions each year communicating a version of reality in which data centers are benevolent infrastructure: the place your vacation photos live, the system that runs your company’s email, the engine behind your favorite streaming service. And this is all, in a technical sense, accurate. Data centers do store photos. They do run apps. They are, genuinely, the physical substrate of the modern internet.

But this framing obscures something fundamental. It treats the infrastructure as neutral — as a passive container for digital life, rather than an active participant in it. A water tower holds water. A data center does not merely hold data. It processes it, analyzes it, routes it, sells access to it, and — as over a decade of documented evidence now confirms — shares it, under specific legal circumstances, with government intelligence agencies. The water tower does not know who you are. The data center almost certainly does.

The cover story also omits scale. When the public thinks of "the cloud," it imagines something ambient and ethereal — a kind of digital atmosphere. The reality is profoundly physical. The International Energy Agency estimated that data centers consumed approximately 415 terawatt-hours of electricity globally in 2024, roughly 1.5 percent of all electricity used on Earth. By 2030, that figure is projected to nearly double, rising to approximately 945 TWh — representing close to 3 percent of total global consumption, driven in large part by the explosive energy demands of artificial intelligence workloads. These are not incidental utilities. They are among the largest, fastest-growing, and most strategically significant infrastructure assets on the planet.

By 2030: Global data center electricity consumption is projected to reach 945 TWh — nearly double 2024 levels — according to the International Energy Agency. AI-focused facilities are expected to triple their power draw within the same period.

SECTION II: THE SURVEILLANCE ARCHITECTURE — WHAT THE DOCUMENTS REVEAL

On June 6, 2013, two of the largest newspapers — The Guardian and The Washington Post — published a series of documents that fundamentally altered the public's understanding of digital infrastructure. The source was Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor then employed by Booz Allen Hamilton. The documents revealed, among much else, the existence of a clandestine surveillance program known as PRISM.

PRISM, which had been operating since 2007 under the authority of the USA Patriot Act and later the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, allowed the National Security Agency to collect stored internet communications — including the contents of emails, file transfers, live chats, and search histories — directly from the systems of America's largest technology companies. The leaked briefing materials identified the participating firms in chilling specificity: Microsoft (2007), Yahoo (2008), Google (2009), Facebook (2009), YouTube (2010), AOL (2011), Skype (2011), and Apple (2012).

The companies, almost uniformly, denied having granted the government "direct access" to their systems — a carefully worded denial that did not contradict the substance of what had been revealed. What the briefing documents made clear was the extraordinary depth of the program’s reach. One detail, buried in the speaker’s notes of an NSA PowerPoint presentation reviewed by The Washington Post, stood out with particular force: "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft." Three companies. The majority of American digital communication. A single classified program.

"DELIBERATELY WRITING OVERBROAD SURVEILLANCE AUTHORITIES AND TRUSTING THAT FUTURE ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DECIDE NOT TO EXPLOIT THEM IS A RECIPE FOR ABUSE."

— CIVIL LIBERTIES ANALYSTS ON THE EXPANSION OF SECTION 702 SURVEILLANCE AUTHORITY

The legal architecture enabling this has only grown more expansive since Snowden's revelations. In 2024, Congress passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which reauthorized and significantly amended Section 702 of FISA. Among its most contested provisions was an expanded definition of who qualifies as an "electronic communication service provider" — language that critics warned could potentially extend NSA data demands to a far broader class of businesses: hotels, data storage facilities, equipment maintenance companies, and others whose services touch digital communications infrastructure. The surveillance net, already vast, was handed a wider casting arm. Congress also expanded the types of information the government could acquire under Section 702 to include intelligence related to international drug trafficking — a mission creep that has alarmed civil liberties advocates across the political spectrum.

The data centers, in this framework, are not passive. They are the physical sites where surveillance intersects with commerce. The servers humming behind those unmarked walls are not just storing your photographs. They are, under the right legal conditions, open windows into the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Please go to Elite Info News to continue reading.

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Watch the following Tucker Carlson interesting interview then read this:

The Israeli Cybersecurity Footprint in America: Every Company, Every State, Every Federal Contract

Related:

AI Data Centers & Our Communities

Oracle CEO: Underground cloud security system 'critical' to Israel

First underground data center in Israel built to 'withstand missiles and car bombs'

Edit: It has been suggested this interview is propaganda. It likely is but readers and viewers can come to their own decision whether or not this woman is Israeli Mossad sent in to misdirect. This investigative journalist unearthed who's actually funding the pro-war bot farms: