The cloud has an address, and it is a coal pit in Kazakhstan

In 2021 I gave a TEDx talk called Le cloud n'existe pas. The argument was that the word "cloud" is a marketing decision, that the thing itself is buildings, cables and power stations, and that we tear up landscapes for the coal that keeps it running.

That last part was the line I expected to be argued with. Nobody argued. I think most people filed it under rhetorical flourish, which is roughly where I filed it myself.

It now has a name, a town, a river, a start date and a shortlist of customers. Reporterre reported it last week, and the details are worse than the image I used on stage.

Where

Ekibastuz, Pavlodar region, northern Kazakhstan. A town of a hundred thousand people sitting next to the Bogatyr mine, one of the largest open-pit coal operations on earth. The pit covers roughly the area of the city of Lyon and goes down three hundred metres.

I said we raze mountains. I was wrong in the direction that makes it worse. Nobody is flattening a summit here. They are removing the ground and leaving a hole you could drop a French city into.

Next to it, a project called Data Center Valley, pitched as the largest data centre complex in Central Asia. Kazakhtelecom is leading it, the Californian startup Firebird.ai is co-piloting, NVIDIA supplies the chips. Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and the Emirati group G42 are named as interested parties.

That last sentence needs its caveat, because it is the part everyone will drop when they share this: no contract has been signed. Interest is not a purchase order. If you repeat this story, repeat that with it.

The arithmetic

The first building is a fifty megawatt facility due in June 2027, burning about 280,000 tonnes of coal a year.

At full capacity the campus is projected at nine terawatt-hours a year, fed by more than five million tonnes of coal. Bogatyr Komir plans to take the mine from forty-two million tonnes a year to over fifty-six by 2032.

Those numbers hang together, which is how you know they are not marketing. Nine terawatt-hours spread across a year is a bit over one gigawatt running flat out, day and night, forever. Five million tonnes of this grade of coal through a thermal plant lands in the same range. The mine expansion is sized for the load. Nobody is exaggerating for a press release here, the plan is coherent, and that is the disturbing part.

Then the water. More than two thousand cubic metres a day for cooling, about three hundred Olympic pools a year, drawn from the Irtysh, a river whose flow is already dropping.

The town

Kazakhstan has committed to carbon neutrality by 2060. It is not closing a single coal plant to make room for this. Several more are under construction.

A 2023 study by the Czech NGO Arnika put Ekibastuz among the most polluted towns in the country: the highest sulphur dioxide concentrations it recorded, nitrogen dioxide at three times the level of comparable cities. The Pavlodar region reports above-average cancer rates. Local groups are raising the usual list that comes with burning coal next to where people sleep, fine particles, heavy metals, toxic gases.

No environmental impact assessment has been published, although the law requires one.

So the finished picture is a hundred thousand people breathing the exhaust of a power supply built for servers that will answer questions for people on another continent, and the assessment that would tell them what they are inhaling has not been released.

What I got wrong on that stage

Two things, and they matter more than the part I got right.

I was talking about video. In 2021 streaming was about sixty percent of the internet's emissions and that was where I pointed, because that was where the load was. The load that arrived instead is inference. Nothing in my talk anticipated a demand curve that would make a coal basin economically attractive again in 2026. I described the mechanism correctly and completely missed the scale.

And I made the wrong thing the villain. "The cloud does not exist" was a line about invisibility, about a metaphor that hides infrastructure from the people using it. But there is nothing invisible about a three-hundred-metre pit the size of Lyon. It is one of the most visible objects humans have ever made. The problem was never that we could not see it. It is that it is six thousand kilometres from the people whose prompts pay for it, which is not the same failure at all, and it is a harder one to fix with a talk.

And the part where I am in the photo

I use these models every day. They write tests with me, they review my code. I ship a product whose entire function is running text through a model. My hosting, my tooling, my work, all of it sits on somebody's servers somewhere, and the fact that mine happen to be in France running on nuclear power is an accident of where I was born, not a decision I can take credit for.

So this is not a piece telling you to stop using AI, which I would be in no position to write and you would be right to ignore.

It is narrower than that. The industry spent this decade telling us efficiency would take care of it: better chips, better cooling, better models. Efficiency is real, every one of those improvements happened, and demand ate all of it and then went looking for a coal basin. Ekibastuz is what "we will make it more efficient" looks like at the far end.

What I would ask for

Not much, and none of it is about individual behaviour, because your Netflix habit was never the story and my talk gave that impression more than it should have.

Publish the impact assessment. Kazakh law already requires it, and a project of this size operating without one is the whole problem in miniature: the compute is global, the accountability is local and can be skipped.

And when Microsoft, Amazon or OpenAI move from interested party to signature, say where the power comes from. They all publish carbon reports. A campus like this one either shows up in those reports or it does not, and which of those happens will tell you exactly how much the pledges are worth.

Five years ago I said the cloud does not exist. I would put it differently now. The cloud exists, it is Ekibastuz, it has a postcode, and roughly a hundred thousand people live inside the part of it we do not put in the diagrams.