The Year in Water, 2025 – Power Shift
In 2011, as the U.S. economy reeled from the Great Recession, tech investor Marc Andreessen wrote a Wall Street Journal essay arguing that companies like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google were dismantling old business models. “Software,” he declared, “is eating the world.” He was right: over the next decade, software reshaped economies, societies, and global markets.
Today, that transformation has entered a new phase. Data centers are rising at extraordinary speed, signaling that hardware — the physical backbone of digital life — is now “eating the world.” The catalyst is the AI revolution, which requires enormous computing power to train and run models. Whether AI delivers breakthroughs or disappointments, the resources invested in it will have deep consequences for workers, economic growth, and the global demand for energy, water, and land.
By 2025, the scale and urgency of this shift came into sharp focus. The rapid buildout of AI infrastructure, together with its soaring energy requirements and hidden water footprint, made clear to both policymakers and the public that the digital world is inseparable from the physical one — and that the next chapter of the tech revolution will reshape the planet’s natural resources as profoundly as software reshaped its economy.
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