The Cloud Has a Footprint

What Bereshit asks of us in the age of artificial intelligence

Perhaps the most misleading word in modern technology is cloud. We store photographs in the cloud. Our documents live there. Our music, financial records and correspondence seem to float somewhere above us, weightless and almost immaterial. Increasingly, artificial intelligence feels much the same. We type a question into a screen and, seconds later, receive an answer produced through extraordinary computational power. It feels almost magical. But there is no cloud. There are buildings. Large ones.

Behind our digital lives stand data centers filled with servers, processors, networking equipment and cooling systems. They require land and electricity. They generate heat. Depending upon their design and location, some consume significant quantities of water. The technology feels invisible because its physical infrastructure is usually somewhere else.

That helps explain one of the growing tensions surrounding artificial intelligence. We embrace AI at remarkable speed, while communities across the country increasingly question the data centers needed to sustain it.

Their questions are legitimate. How much electricity will these facilities consume? How much water will they require? Who will pay for new transmission lines and substations? Will residential customers subsidize infrastructure built primarily for some of the wealthiest corporations in the world? What do surrounding communities receive in return? Those are not anti-technology questions. They are questions of responsibility. And for Jews, responsibility has a very old vocabulary.

In the second chapter of Bereshit, humanity is placed in the Garden of Eden with a deceptively simple charge: le’ovdah u’leshomrah, to work it and to guard it. The two verbs belong together. The Torah does not imagine human beings as passive occupants of creation. We are commanded to cultivate, build and transform possibilities into realities. Agriculture, medicine, engineering, science and technology all express the creative capacity with which human beings have been endowed. Human ingenuity is not an affront to creation. It is part of our vocation within it.

But there is a second verb: u’leshomrah, to guard it. Our permission to create is accompanied by an obligation to preserve. That is why I do not believe the Jewish response to data centers should simply be, “Do not build them.” If we want the remarkable benefits of artificial intelligence, digital communication and cloud computing, the physical infrastructure sustaining them must exist somewhere.

But le’ovdah never stands alone. Indispensable infrastructure is not exempt from moral scrutiny simply because we depend upon it. Communities should not be expected to absorb whatever environmental and economic costs our digital appetite creates. Developers should disclose honestly what their projects will consume. Infrastructure costs should not quietly migrate onto residential ratepayers. Water use should reflect local conditions. And communities hosting these facilities deserve a meaningful voice in determining the conditions under which they are built. That is not hostility toward progress. It is what le’ovdah u’leshomrah looks like in practice.

Modern life makes such responsibility difficult because it separates benefit from consequence. We buy food without seeing the farm. We switch on a light without seeing the power plant. We order a package without seeing the warehouse. Now we summon enormous computational power through a device in our hands without seeing the servers, electrical equipment and cooling systems that make the response possible. Convenience creates distance. Distance creates invisibility. And invisibility makes responsibility easier to avoid.

There is another phrase in Bereshit that has begun to sound different to me in this context: vayar Elohim ki tov, “And God saw that it was good.” God creates, and then God sees. The creation story does not present making as sufficient unto itself. Creation is followed by attention and evaluation. God looks at what has been made. That is precisely what a technological civilization needs to recover. We have become extraordinarily good at creating. The harder discipline is learning to see the full consequences of what we create.

I use artificial intelligence myself. I am continually astonished by what it makes possible. It assists me in research, writing, analysis and ordinary tasks. Precisely because I benefit from it, I cannot pretend that its physical footprint belongs to somebody else. That is where the moral question becomes personal. It is easy to defend environmental responsibility when somebody else’s convenience is at stake. It becomes harder when the resource being consumed supports something we ourselves value.

We cannot demand ever greater computing power and then insist that the power plants, transmission lines, water consumption and data centers necessary to provide it should always be located somewhere we will never see them. Nor should communities be told that technological progress requires them simply to accept whatever burdens accompany it. The biblical demand is harder than either position. Le’ovdah u’leshomrah. Create and guard. Develop and preserve. Benefit and accept responsibility for the cost of that benefit.

The deepest environmental challenge posed by artificial intelligence is therefore not simply how much electricity or water a particular data center consumes. Those are measurable questions for engineers, planners and public officials. The deeper Jewish question is whether we are willing to see what our blessings require of the world around us. The screen is visible. The infrastructure is not. The benefit reaches us instantly. The consequences may occur hundreds of miles away. But distance does not relieve responsibility. Bereshit places the human being inside the garden, not above it. We are beneficiaries of creation, but also its custodians.

The cloud has a footprint. And if we intend to keep walking upon it, le’ovdah u’leshomrah demands that we care where it lands.