Artificial intelligence is usually discussed in terms of what the technology can do. Will it replace jobs, write books, diagnose illness, design weapons, discover medicines? Will the machines outthink humanity?
The more basic question is who owns the machines.
AI runs on chips, electric power, cooling systems, transmission lines, enormous buildings and billions of dollars in machinery. Workers build and maintain all of it. Utilities supply the electricity. Communities supply the land, water, roads and other infrastructure. The data center makes the class character of AI visible.
In 1987, revolutionary Marxist Sam Marcy wrote about an earlier wave of technological change. Computers, electronics, automation and atomic energy offered enormous possibilities for humanity, yet under capitalism they were bringing layoffs, insecurity and new dangers. He summed up the contradiction in a few words: “technology comes into being as capital.”
Under capitalism, a new technology appears as privately owned machinery whose immediate purpose is profit. Whether it meets a human need is secondary. AI is following the same path.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and other giant corporations are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on computing infrastructure. When a handful of corporate boards decide how much computing power they want, they are deciding electric generation, transmission, water use and industrial investment for entire regions.
The Energy Department’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated in June 2026 that data centers could use about one-eighth of all the electricity in the United States by 2030, and more than one-seventh in its highest scenario. The accumulation of AI capital is reshaping the physical infrastructure everyone depends on.
Three Mile Island, then and now
On March 28, 1979, Unit 2 at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial meltdown. The accident set off a national crisis and a mass anti-nuclear movement.
Within two weeks, Marcy was writing about what he called the “Three Mile Island disaster.” He went straight to the class question: Who controlled nuclear power?
The plants belonged to power companies tied into a network of banks and industrial monopolies. Decisions about public safety were made inside an industry organized for private profit. Marcy’s demand was to “take the nuclear industry out of the hands of the monopolies and put it in the hands of the workers.” He called for shutting the industry down until it was safely in workers’ hands, and for nationalization under trade-union and workers’ control, backed by the communities and with strong participation by Black, Latine and other oppressed peoples.
Unit 2 never reopened. Unit 1, a separate reactor at the same site, ran until Sept. 26, 2019, when it was closed because it no longer turned enough profit.
Now it is coming back. In September 2024, Constellation Energy signed a 20-year deal to sell the reactor’s power to Microsoft for its data centers and renamed the plant the Crane Clean Energy Center. The federal government backed the restart with a $1 billion loan in 2025. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission completed its environmental review in late September 2026, and Constellation is aiming to restart the reactor as early as 2027.
The site where Marcy raised the question of monopoly ownership and workers’ control in 1979 is being revived to feed a new concentration of monopoly capital.
Productivity as a threat
Machines that can do more human labor should be good news. If society can produce the same necessities with fewer hours of labor, people should work less. Technology could eliminate dangerous, exhausting and monotonous jobs and give workers more leisure along with more abundance.
Under capitalism, a machine that can do the work of 10 people is a chance for the boss to employ fewer people. The productive power belongs to the owner of the machine, so the worker meets greater productivity as a threat.
AI can automate clerical work, translate languages, analyze medical data and assist scientific research. The same systems are being used to eliminate jobs, speed up work, monitor workers, automate hiring and firing, and pile more output on each worker who remains. The technology that could shorten the working day appears as capital, and it is used to raise the return on capital.
There is no cloud
Calling AI a “cloud” service hides its material basis. There are server racks packed with processors, substations and transformers, transmission lines, cooling towers and water systems, and power plants feeding the whole thing. And there are workers.
Seen in physical form, the questions become concrete. Why should a private corporation decide that thousands of megawatts of generating capacity go to its servers? Why should corporations decide where new transmission lines and power plants are built? Why should workers and communities find out only after the decision how much electricity and water a project will take? Why should the productivity created by these investments belong to the owners of the servers instead of the society whose labor and infrastructure made them possible?
Neither worship nor rejection
After Three Mile Island, Marcy opposed turning the struggle against the nuclear monopolies into a demand for a “non-nuclear world.” The slogan shifted responsibility away from the ruling class of the United States, which had introduced the bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and dictated to countries without coal or oil how they should develop. Those countries might decide nuclear power was necessary, and socialist countries had the right to make that decision for themselves. The technology and the social relations around it are two different things.
The same holds for AI. A demand to stop AI development as such leaves untouched the real question: who controls the productive capacity already built. AI is used for military targeting, surveillance and sharper exploitation of labor. It can also aid medical research, climate science, engineering, translation and education. The decisive issue is who has the power to decide what gets computed and why.
Workers have to enter the fight
Marcy criticized the trade-union leadership for leaving nuclear power to corporate executives, government commissions, politicians and technical experts. The working class had its own interests and needed to intervene independently.
He made the same argument about technological change in 1987. The giant corporations kept their plans secret from workers, unions and the public, and the union leadership was slow to respond. Marcy called for unions and community groups, especially in oppressed communities, to conduct their own studies of what new technology would do to workers, with no new system introduced without their approval. The goal was to build enough organized strength to win “a veto over the introduction of any new scientific-technological systems” harmful to workers and the community.
With AI, the debate cannot be left to Silicon Valley executives, venture capitalists, Pentagon officials and corporate expert panels.
Communities are already moving. In Boxtown, a majority-Black neighborhood in South Memphis, Tennessee, settled by formerly enslaved families and long saddled with industrial pollution, residents found in 2025 that Elon Musk’s xAI was running 35 methane gas turbines without air permits to power its supercomputer. At an April 25, 2025, hearing, one resident held up her asthma inhaler and demanded the county deny the permit. The fight has followed xAI across the state line into Southaven, Mississippi. Nationwide, more than 300 cities, towns and counties have banned or paused construction of giant data centers.
Workers have their own demands to bring. If AI raises productivity, workers can demand shorter hours with no loss in pay instead of layoffs. If an employer brings in algorithmic management, workers can demand control over how it is used. If a corporation wants a giant data center, the workers and communities whose electricity, water and infrastructure it will consume have the right to decide whether it serves a social need. And if computing has become essential to the operation of the whole economy, there is no reason its direction should remain the private property of a handful of monopolies.
Who controls the productive forces?
AI is an extraordinary development of the productive forces, which is exactly why the question of ownership has become sharper.
Society has accumulated enough scientific knowledge and productive capacity to build machines that perform intellectual labor that once took enormous amounts of human time. These machines have emerged inside a society where productive wealth is privately owned.
In “Class struggle in the nuclear age,” Marcy rejected the view that the nuclear danger came from humanity losing control of its own productive forces. The danger grew, he wrote, because science and technology had become subservient to big capital and integrated with the capitalist state. AI is being developed the same way, by monopolies that take Pentagon contracts.
A technology that could reduce labor threatens people’s livelihoods. A technology that could extend human knowledge becomes proprietary property. A computing system built from the accumulated labor and knowledge of society becomes a corporate asset, and every gain in society’s productive power becomes another means of piling up private wealth.
Marcy’s answer to Three Mile Island in 1979 turned on the same questions: who owned it, who controlled it, who bore its risks and who got its benefits. Changing the machine could not substitute for changing the social relations that govern it.
The data centers rising across the country pose that question again on a larger scale. Technology has once again come into being as capital. The struggle is over whether it will remain that way.
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