The Datacenter Does Not Exist
Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo on AI & Exocapitalism, Q&A by Dena Yago
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A sharp look at AI’s trillion-dollar boom through exocapitalism, where data centers become financial instruments, and the future of software hangs in the balance.
This lecture examines AI infrastructure through exocapitalism, a framework for understanding how capital can move independently of physical constraints like energy, labor, and raw materials. Marek and Roberto explore the strange economics of the AI boom (trillion-dollar announcements, debts backed by computer chips, and endless layers of intermediary management services) to argue that the "datacenter" now exists primarily as a financial object: a bundle of contracts, debts, and speculative claims. They conclude by identifying the race that will define 2026: between the financialization of massively-centralized infrastructure and the death of software as we currently know it.
Exocapitalism: economies with absolutely no limits (2025, Becoming Press) has been lauded as among both the most controversial and the most accurate assessments of this economic moment -- from “unbelievably inspiring” (Hito Steyerl) to “the Das Kapital of the 21st Century” (New Models) to “an info-hazard” (Metalabel) by “Hegel’s grandchildren” (Nick Land, derogatory). Marek and Roberto won Google’s 2024 Art and Machine Intelligence Award for their work in AI interface design.
Presented as part of IRL @ Index, a live event and video series about paying attention and imagining what's to come by garden3d TK.