With that said, Empire of AI is a powerful work, bristling not only with great reporting but also with big ideas. The second theme is more complex and forms the book’s thesis about what Hao calls AI colonialism. “I’ve found only one metaphor that encapsulates the nature of what these AI power players are: empires,” she writes. She documents how workers in Kenya who performed data-labeling content moderation for OpenAI came away traumatized by seeing so much disturbing material. In Chile she documents how the industry extracts precious resources—water, power, copper, lithium—to build out data centers.