Artificial intelligence is going to upend every aspect of our society — or at least that’s what some of the leading people in the tech industry want us to believe. For the past year, they’ve been adamant that every worker will have an AI assistant, chatbots will take the place of doctors and teachers, and their products might even get to the point that they threaten our very existence. (But that shouldn’t stop us from building them.)

Now, that all sounds a bit farfetched to me, but there’s no denying these narratives are designed to set the foundation for a much more expansive rollout of these technologies. What’s often left unsaid is the true cost of that decision. There are always people harmed in the tech industry’s commercial schemes, but what’s often less remarked upon is the material cost of the future visions they’re uniquely empowered to bring into being.

Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made a rare admission of what his future entails. Speaking to Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum, he acknowledged “we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” The amount of energy needed to power his vision for AI would require an “energy breakthrough” that he had faith (not proof) would come, and in the meantime we could rely on “geoengineering as a stopgap.”

The AI tools being pushed by OpenAI, Google, and their peers are far more energy intensive than the products they aim to displace. In the days after ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, Sam Altman called its computing costs “eye-watering” and several months later Alphabet chairman John Hennessy told Reuters that getting a response from Google’s chatbot would “likely cost 10 times more” than using its traditional search tools. Instead of reassessing their plans, major tech companies are doubling down and planning a massive expansion of the computing infrastructure available to them.