Why do Tech Billionaires Crave Infinite Energy?

“Goochland wants to attract businesses to their eastern designated growth area to drive tax revenue and economic growth,” but residents of Goochland and Henrico Counties are concerned as local governments rush to join what looks like a stampede of unchecked development in central Virginia.”

Specifically, they’re worried about living near heavy industry developments such as a small modular nuclear reactor facility (SMR), a natural gas peaking plant, data centers, and a utility generating station. Such projects can now be implemented without public feedback or review/approval of a county’s board of supervisors. Residents are also concerned about Goochland County fast-tracking such developments, especially since they pose serious health and environmental risks.

Why is there a rush to build more power plants and data centers—along with an apparent lack of government transparency?

Rev. Lisa Sykes asked as much while delivering a powerful sermon to the Goochland Planning Commission at the Goochland High School Auditorium on 9/25/25 (excerpted with permission):

The interesting thing about a black hole—you can’t see it. The way you find a black hole is to watch for its immense gravitational pull on everything around it. Because of this pull, you can identify the black hole, even though it is cloaked in darkness…

Our blackhole is excluding citizens from negotiations. The Deputy County Administrator has signed NDA’s, and EVEN though we FOIA’d them, they were TOO redacted to tell us anything…

…Our black hole swallows governmental transparency completely, because the pull, the financial pull, of the potential datacenter is SO IMMENSE!…

…We say Goochland loves rural character, but why then are we willing to pollute the Chesapeake Bay watershed?

Like I said, you can tell there’s a datacenter when the otherwise predictable, dependable patterns of behavior change in those around it, because of its immense financial pull.

In his town hall, Supervisor Lyle shared that Goochland County will newly receive 1.5 million dollars in annual tax revenue from Amazon, and another 93 million dollars from Eli Lilly over the next 20 years.

There’s more to this story than generating tax revenue and meeting Virginia’s energy needs. And that means questioning why tech billionaires are setting their sights on counties like Henrico and Goochland to ramp up energy production like there’s no tomorrow.

A relentless drive to power AI

It’s common knowledge that tech billionaires are in a race to further develop AI technology, and AI requires data centers, which in turn need colossal amounts of energy. But many are questioning its return on investment: Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off? And Deutsche Bank warned that “The AI boom is unsustainable unless tech spending goes ‘parabolic,’” a “highly unlikely” situation.

To offset the costs and potential loss of investors in AI, will tech billionaires push for state and federal governments to take their place? Well, Private equity sees profits in power utilities as electric bills rise and Big Tech seeks more energy. Meanwhile, Amazon is behind Virginia’s “data center construction boom” and plans to build “up to 12 advanced reactors by the early 2030s” in Washington state. And Billionaire Peter Thiel backing first privately developed US uranium enrichment facility in Paducah.

All this is happening at a time when we could take advantage of solar and wind energy, but the Trump Administration has been defunding those options. The Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled in Nevada and A tribe in Arizona planned to connect 600 homes to electricity. Then the funding was cut.

Instead of green solutions, Big Tech wants to go all-in on nuclear power—like the small modular nuclear reactor that could wind up in Goochland—but it’s unproven technology that’s never been attempted in the United States.

Big Tech’s goals are already causing problems because ordinary folks are paying the price of tech billionaires’ bottomless thirst for energy, including here in Virginia. “AI data centers” are making energy bills soar: “Electricity now costs up to 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers.”

Furthermore, Researchers Just Found Something Extremely Alarming About AI’s Power Usage:

…the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly. For instance, a six-second AI video clip consumes four times as much energy as a three-second clip.

Given these alarming developments, what exactly do tech billionaires hope to accomplish with AI?

The allure of “longtermism”

Astrophysicist Adam Becker, the author of More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, did a deep dive into why tech billionaires want to maximize AI (in addition to profit). One of their main goals is to create a superintelligent AI and it’s largely driven by their belief in a concept called “longtermism.”

Becker notes the difference between having a moral obligation to protect future generations (e.g., mitigating climate change), and the scientifically implausible idea of “longtermism,” which is about ensuring that “as many people come after us as possible.” Tech billionaires believe that the “greater their numbers, the better the future is.” (pg. 15)

In other words, they’re far more concerned about the fate of future people that don’t exist instead of people in the present. And they have big plans for Earth and its future population. Here’s a snapshot:

• Elon Musk wants to put fifty million people on Mars by 2050 as a backup plan in case humanity goes extinct
• Jeff Bezos wants to transfer heavy industry to space and build gigantic space habitats that would house trillions of people (hence his Blue Origin project)
• Marc Andreesen wants limitless economic growth, massive energy consumption, and a population expansion
• Sam Altman believes AI will solve climate breakdown
• Patrick Collison believes exponential energy use will end poverty, eliminate waste, and solve climate change

Why are tech billionaires so preoccupied with the fate of people who don’t exist or may never exist? Per Becker, it helps them avoid accountability for their actions that are negatively impacting people in the present.

The immortality fantasy

Becker also relays that a vision shared by “many of the wealthiest and most influential people in the tech industry” is that people will be able to upload their minds “into computers to live for all eternity in a silicon paradise, watched over by a benevolent godlike AI…all needs satisfied, all fears assuaged, all desires sated through the power of unimaginably advanced technology.” (pg. 6)

That vision may help explain why articles about AI personhood appear in publications like The Guardian, which has a strategic partnership with OpenAI.

Of course, brain uploading is purely speculative technology. Becker notes that, “not all neuroscientists agree that the brain’s activity can be fully represented by computation,” let alone be uploaded into a computer. (pg. 186)

Yet the billionaires persist.

Back in 2011, Jeff Bezos donated $15M to Princeton University to study brain function. He also wants to flood the universe with people, which, as Becker describes, would be “colonialism on a universal scale.” (pg. 81)

Per a recent GeekWire article, Bezos envisions “a future fleet of gigawatt data centers” in orbit around the Earth and “thinks there could be millions of people living in space within the next couple of decades. “That’s how fast this is going to accelerate,” he said. “They’ll mostly be living there because they want to.””

Do we?

According to Becker, Bezos also believes in the idea of “limitless growth to save the world.” (Pgs. 22-23):

We want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capita…Everybody on this planet is going to want to be a first-world citizen using first-world amounts of energy, and the people who are first-world citizens today using first-world amounts of energy? We’re going to want to use even more energy…we don’t want to face a civilization of stasis, and that is the real issue if we just stay on this planet.” In short, he doesn’t want to live on an Earth where energy is rationed, citing the need to make civilization “exciting…for our grandchildren’s grandchildren.” (pg. 218)

Adam Becker explains that no technology exists to accomplish the tech billionaires’ goals, nor may it ever, so why do they insist on pursuing them?

Fear of death

Based on his extensive research, Becker suspects there’s a main factor driving the energy production race: a fear of death. He sums it up thusly:

It’s the flesh that dies; it’s flesh that can’t go to space…So flesh must be discarded, if the fantasy is to be maintained. The human body is the enemy. (pg. 144)

There’s a frantic air about all this, the urgent need to go, go, go, to grab as much low-entropy matter and energy as possible before the end of the show trillions of years from now. Ant it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the drive behind that frenetic pace is fear: fear of an end, fear of death. (pg. 203)

Lurking underneath all of the dreams and desires and resentment of the tech billionaires lies a fear of death, the final loss of control. (pg. 251)

Fear of death is nothing new; what’s new is who’s fearing it and what their desperate attempts to avoid it mean for the rest of us.

A tale of two futures

We have a choice between two futures: the one we forge for the collective good, or the one we surrender to the greed and questionable, if not dangerous, whims of tech billionaires.

Is tax revenue, pollution, skyrocketing utility bills, and our health worth allowing tech billionaires to build however many power plants they want in our backyards for not only profit, but also for their unrealistic projects? If billionaires paid their fair share of taxes, that might help offset the costs, but they don’t.

There’s a difference between maximizing energy production for our everyday needs and excessive energy production driven by tech billionaires whose goals don’t align with the best interests of everyone else.

That’s probably one reason why folks in Goochland and Henrico have been asking questions and protesting heavy industry development that threatens our collective safety. In fact, Goochland County will help us gauge the public acceptance of the next generation of small nuclear reactors.

Protecting ourselves now and in the future is why it’s important to stay informed—and get engaged.