03
Dec
Article by Thijs van de Graaf published in the IMF's Finance & Development Magazine | Artificial intelligence is often cast as intangible, a technology that lives in the cloud and thinks in code. The reality is more grounded. Behind every chatbot or image generator lie servers that draw electricity, cooling systems that consume water, chips that rely on fragile supply chains, and minerals dug from the earth.
That physical backbone is rapidly expanding. Data centers are multiplying in number and...