Google fled Amsterdam for Belgium as AI giants bleed public grids
By Maya Ellison · Reporting from Detroit ·
As tech giants push municipal energy systems to the brink, governments must force AI developers to pay for their power infrastructure instead of burdening working taxpayers.
When corporate tech executives gather in Monaco to discuss artificial intelligence, they rarely talk about working-class households. These families pay higher electric bills to keep the lights on. On a recent episode of the podcast Sourcery, host Molly O'Shea sat down with Thema executives Herwig Van Hove and Yannick De Koninck. They discussed the immense physical limits choking the AI buildout. As Van Hove plainly put it, the top concern keeping data center executives awake at night is energy consumption. "The energy consumption is answer number one because it's existential to them. They don't know how to solve it." Van Hove revealed that Google negotiated with municipal officials in Amsterdam before abandoning its plans and relocating to Belgium. Amsterdam's public power grid simply could not satisfy the tech giant's insatiable demand.
The Public Grid Is Not a Private Playground
The conversation on Sourcery laid bare the sheer physical hubris behind a $10 trillion global infrastructure overhaul. BlackRock's Tony Kim recently described that massive rebuild. O'Shea highlighted how existing data centers were never built to handle modern AI models. These models demand staggering amounts of power, land, and water. De Koninck spent five years at Nvidia building silicon photonics technology from scratch. He explained that traditional copper wiring inside data centers is running out of steam. To handle massive artificial intelligence models, hardware architectures must shift to optical interconnects and silicon photonics. This allows thousands of GPUs to communicate across flatter, denser networks.
Van Hove argued that silicon photonics is critical to preventing a complete infrastructure collapse. He pitched his company Thema's European photonic foundry as a solution to supply chain bottlenecks and energy constraints. Deep-tech investors celebrate optical chips as an engineering breakthrough. Yet the underlying problem isn't just a technical bottleneck inside the server rack. It is an unrestrained corporate land grab on municipal energy systems.
The Costs Shifted to Working Families
What the venture capital class views as a market opportunity in Monaco looks very different from the zip codes where power lines actually run. For decades, public electrical grids were constructed as shared civic goods. They were designed to deliver affordable power to homes, schools, and local businesses. Today, hyperscalers and AI speculators treat those municipal grids as their personal, low-cost gas stations.
Google negotiated with Amsterdam before hopping across the border to Belgium in search of easier grid access. This demonstrates how multinational capital treats public infrastructure as entirely disposable. Van Hove and De Koninck are racing to commercialize optical chips that are more energy-efficient per gigabit. Yet that technological fix does nothing to stop aggregate power consumption from skyrocketing. Tech giants still plan to multiply compute capacity by orders of magnitude. Public utility grids are pushed to their absolute breaking point by data centers. In the end, working families endure rolling brownouts and shoulder rate hikes on their monthly bills.
Real Innovation Demands Public Accountability
Tech executives cannot socialize the massive environmental and structural costs of their $10 trillion compute buildout. They must not hoard private gains in offshore corporate accounts. AI developers and chipmakers require gigawatts of electricity to run their algorithms. Government regulators must force them to construct their own dedicated renewable energy capacity. They must pay the full cost of grid upgrades upfront. We cannot let corporate titans burn through the public grid until working families sit in the dark.