Raoul Pal: Data Centers Will Not Take Resources from People but Create New Wealth

The political narrative that data centers will take electricity and water from people is fundamentally flawed, according to Global Macro Investor founder Raoul Pal. He argues that while demand will indeed increase significantly, the main issue is not resource scarcity but who will own the infrastructure that will power everything.

Pal debunks the popular scare story that AI centers will consume all the energy, leaving ordinary people to fight for water used to cool servers. The investor claims that proponents of such ideas are looking at the situation from the wrong perspective: they see AI only as a resource consumer and fail to notice that it also produces. AI agents do not take space from people but become independent economic players alongside them. These are billions of new workers who do not sleep, act with incredible speed, and constantly demand resources—data, computations, storage, energy, and tokens. The demand for all this will indeed skyrocket. But along with it, the economy itself will grow because each agent not only consumes energy but also creates value.

Pal calls this an 'economic singularity': synthetic labor removes previous growth constraints, and the traditional GDP measure becomes meaningless in such conditions. In other words, in his view, data centers do not share existing resources with people but help create much more wealth than before. Therefore, the fear of data centers, according to Pal, hides another concern—that all this new wealth will go to someone else. But here, he says, the current wave of technology is fundamentally different from the internet boom: for the first time in history, the infrastructure layer can belong to everyone.

According to his logic, all agent activity should be coordinated on first-level blockchains (L1). Hence, Pal's practical advice: instead of fearing new energy consumers, one should own the 'rails' on which this flow will travel and profit from the growth along with it.