The latest tech company to reach the upper echelons of cybernetic capitalism is Nvidia, which fabricates Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a component of computing-machinery that has become dominant in training AI models. Founded in 1993, Nvidia is the only tech-titan to be named after an actual Titan; Invidia is the Roman name for the Greek deity Nemesis, the personification of envy, hence the green ‘evil eye’ that is the corporation’s logo. Nvidia is currently the second-most valuable corporation on earth, with a market capitalization of $3.54 trillion, narrowly trailing Apple and above Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet. Its market value has increased almost tenfold since the end of 2022. The AI bubble is the latest development in the rampant financialization that began over half a century ago as cybernetics began to reshape global capitalism – intensified by quantitative easing in the wake of the global financial crisis.
Most of Nvidia’s 32-year history was spent creating GPUs for gaming computers. The AI boom transformed their business model: where once they had many customers, they now have very few, very big customers. Their recent quarterly regulatory filing noted: ‘We have experienced periods where we receive a significant amount of our revenue from a limited number of customers, and this trend may continue.’ This is putting it mildly: the same filing shows four unnamed corporations account for almost half of their revenue. These anonymous four (almost certainly the other apex tech-titans) are buying up large numbers of Nvidia’s GPUs in order to stack them into vast data centres, networking thousands of these powerful computer-machines together to further advanced AI research. They have already pre-sold the entire 2025 output of their soon-to-debut Blackwell GPUs, each of which costs around $40,000. As with the other tech-titans, Nvidia’s market lead depends on being at the cutting edge of the technosciences, with their power coming from cybernetic research and development. Nvidia increased their R&D budget by almost 50% across 2024.
One can get a cross-sectional view of the bleeding edge of cybernetic capitalism by considering the fate of the GPUs that have made Nvidia fabulously rich. These devices are key to the calculations that allow AI to fold models of proteins, automate away labour costs, create kill lists for the IDF’s genocide, plagiarise essays, engage in financial speculation, create deep-fakes of dead dictators, and all the other AI wonders. Thereafter, these computing-machines will succumb to their built-in obsolescence and realise their longer-term destiny of becoming toxic e-waste. This is the dark underside of ‘Moore’s Law’, which projects that the number of transistors that can be packed onto a computer chip doubles roughly every two years: exponentially increasing computer power goes hand-in-hand with exponentially increasing waste. According to the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, 62 million tonnes of e-waste was generated in 2022, double the amount produced in 2010. As their recent report describes, this is ‘equal to the weight of 107,000 of world’s largest (853-seat), heaviest (575 tonne) passenger aircraft – enough to form an unbroken queue from New York to Athens, from Nairobi to Hanoi, or from Hong Kong to Anchorage’.
As with computing-machines in general, the precise material composition of a GPU is difficult to discern, hidden as it is behind byzantine supply lines, intellectual property law and the ‘black-box’ character of technoscience. Suffice to say, they are composed of an extremely complex assortment of chemicals, including various rare earth minerals (tantalum, palladium, boron, cobalt, tungsten, hafnium etc.), heavy metals (lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury etc.), complex plastics (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, polymethyl methacrylate, etc.), and synthetic substances (tetrabrombisphenyl-A, tetrafluorocyclohexanes, etc.). For comparison: a human body comprises around 30 of the 118 elements in the periodic table; an iPhone 75 elements. All these raw ingredients need to be mined from the earth, refined, recombined and heavily processed, producing various toxic byproducts – to say nothing of the effect on the health of the workers across these supply lines. The extended apparatus of cybernetic capitalism operates with a stunning lack of public-interest or environmental regulations.
One aspect of the colossal waste generated by cybernetic capitalism that is finally beginning to attract some mainstream attention is the amount of electricity that networked computing-machines consume. The International Energy Agency notes that between 2022 and 2026 data centres will likely double their electricity consumption, up to around 1,000 terawatt hours. This increase is approximately equivalent to adding the entire electricity usage of another Germany. Taken collectively, data centres’ demand for power is higher than that of any country except China, the US and India. And data centres are only one part of the global infrastructure of networked computing-machines – which currently consists of around 30 billion internet-connected devices. Such consumption figures, moreover, do not account for the energy used in the mining and refining of huge quantities of raw materials to produce the machinery itself and they certainly do not consider any toxic ‘externalities’.
As cybernetics has supercharged capitalism’s industrial capacities, it has created vast amounts of toxic waste that cascade through supply chains and accumulate across food chains. One famous example is the PFAS (pre/polyfluoroalkyl substances), or ‘forever chemicals’ – a group of around 15,000 different synthetic organofluoride compounds that do not naturally break down. First created in the 1950s, these toxic chemicals – found in all computing-machines, among many, many other household products – are now commonly detected in human bodies, with accumulation beginning in the placenta before birth. They are strongly linked to increased chances of cancer, declining sperm count, inflammatory bowel disease, cognitive impairments, birth defects, kidney disease, thyroid issues and liver problems. According to the Lancet Commission on pollution and health, environmental pollution already causes one in six premature deaths, a figure set to worsen as both production and bioaccumulation continue to intensify.
Chemical pollution also afflicts other species, and thus the ecological relationships, systems and processes that make up the web of life. Indeed, the massive production of unnatural chemicals is a key marker of the new epoch that opened with the first atomic explosions in 1945, at the blinding dawn of the Anthropocene. In 2019, the global sale of synthetic chemicals – excluding pharmaceuticals – was estimated to be around $4.363 trillion. The magnitude of industrial chemical release is staggering; a conservative estimate puts it at around 220 billion tonnes per annum, of which greenhouse gas accounts for only about 20%.
Shockingly little attention is paid to the ramifications. For example, of the ∼23 000 chemicals registered in 2020 via the EU’s world-leading regulation, Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH), around 80% have yet to undergo a safety assessment – to say nothing of the over 300,000 synthetic chemicals in production globally but not on their list. And the safety assessments are narrowly defined, excluding cocktail effects and ecological entanglements. One comprehensive study concluded that chemical pollution ‘represents a potential catastrophic risk to the human future and merits global scientific scrutiny on the same scale and urgency as the effort devoted to climate change’.
The scale of cybernetic waste is difficult to grasp. One insightful study found that at the beginning of the 20th century the mass of human-produced objects – concrete, bricks, asphalt, metals, plastics and so on – was equal to about 3% of the world’s total ‘biomass’, the combined weight of the web of life: every plant, bacteria, fungi, archaea, protists and animal. It revealed that the mass of anthropogenic materials has been doubling every twenty years across the last century. At this rate, 2020 was the year in which human-made mass reached 1.1 teratonnes, exceeding the entirety of global biomass. The stuff we have made, in other words, now outweighs the web of life. The weight of the entire animal kingdom – every cow, coral and krill, every person, pigeon and all 350,000 different species of beetle – is around 0.5% of Earth’s biomass, or around 4 gigatons of life. As of 2020, humans have produced 8 gigatons of plastics. By 2040, it will be double that.
Exponential curves such as these are wreaking havoc upon finite nature. Yet few on the radical left engage in a holistic analysis that would attempt to answer Langdon Winner’s pertinent question: ‘Where and how have innovations in science and technology begun to alter the very conditions of life itself?’ It is common for radical commentators to succumb to the illusion that computing-machinery is weightless. A handful of recent Jacobin headlines – ‘The Problem With AI Is About Power, Not Technology’; ‘The Problem With AI Is the Problem With Capitalism’; ‘Automation Could Set Us Free – If We Didn’t Live Under Capitalism’ – evince this ‘instrumental’ view of technology, which sees the advanced machinery of cybernetic capitalism as unproblematic, reserving criticism for the bosses’ control over it. Many on the left suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that the solution is to ‘collectivise the platforms’: get rid of the bosses, get rid of the problem. This risks ‘worker-washing’ the toxifying apparatus of cybernetic capitalism, imagining that replacing Nvidia’s CEO with a workers’ council, say, would be sufficient to bring about a sustainable socialist future.
We of course need workers’ councils – very many of them across the entire social realm. We likely also will not wish to dispense with some of the powerful computing-machines and synthetic chemicals that cybernetic capitalism has produced. But we need to consider what their place should be in a world in which meaningful and flourishing lives can be lived within ecological limits. The exponential expansion of cybernetic technologies and the alienating abstractions they have wrought is a catastrophe. It is urgently necessary that we develop a materialist critique of such technology with the aim of bringing forth a radically different politics, one that would take a more capacious view, considering not just relations of power and ownership, but the material throughput of cybernetic capitalism and its transformation of the conditions of life itself. The magnitude of the crisis demands nothing less.
Read on: André Gorz, ‘Political Ecology: Expertocracy versus Self-Limitation’, NLR I/202.