AI Is the New Religion, and Data Centers Are the New Churches

How tech oligarchs have become modern evangelists

Yes, I used Midjourney for this one. Apologies, I couldn’t find a real image of a data center with a cross — yet.

There’s an empty prompt window on your laptop screen at 3 a.m., waiting to respond. If this tech had been available a century ago, people might have begun with something like, “Dear God…”

But a prompt is not a direct line to the Big Guy (or Gal) in the sky. It’s a connection to a GPU somewhere in a data center, where long rows of servers hum away without the presence of humans.

Like a higher power, your “prayer” — in this case, a prompt — is answered. The questions you have about life are answered by a faceless entity, and you can’t help but feel that it’s magic. You don’t quite understand how it all works, and that’s part of why you worship it.

Instead of a traditional God that has supposedly passed along all its wisdom to humanity, we have created an “AI God” by feeding it everything we know. It can remix that information in admittedly useful ways, and it can do so faster than the brightest minds in human history. God-like power, you could say, that leaves the masses in awe.

It rewards you in ways you couldn’t have imagined. Aside from listening to your darkest confessions without judgment like a priest, it can cheer you up with jokes or send you a virtual partner to keep you company during your loneliest times. (God looks away when you get freaky with it.)

AI can even revive your dead loved one by uploading their voice, mannerisms, and likeness. It’s like connecting with their spirit through an Ouija board, except now it’s done with a keyboard. It gives the impression that their souls are stored somewhere we can’t see, sort of like a digital heaven.

Profit over prayer

AI data centers are popping up like churches in a new age of digital-based faith. Just like European settlers, tech oligarchs are colonizing vulnerable communities and erasing their culture and resources without giving back to the people already there. They feed us free samples of their language models like religious brochures, tempting us to pay for a “better” experience.

And many do. AI is becoming increasingly ingrained in everyone’s life, affirming their decisions and being an attentive “friend”. People love it back, enough to pay for it each month to help keep its mission afloat. Like a donation to a church to help it spread the word about God, and keep its aisles buzzing.

Parishioners of the new AI church are subscribers and investors. Global church revenue was estimated at more than $400 billion worldwide in 2023, while corporate investments in the big AI companies reached more than $250 billion in 2024.

The “megachurches” that are the biggest tech firms, including Anthropic and OpenAI, are set to go public soon, with a combined valuation of around $2.9 *trillion*. OpenAI alone is valued at $852 billion. Once they go public, more people will have an incentive to keep them from collapsing to protect their own interests. They will have no choice but to spread the gospel.

Churches were never meant to be profit-driven enterprises, but they have been shaped by capitalist interests over the decades. While churches are still somehow exempt from taxes, big AI companies are reducing the tax base by displacing workers.

While the companies deploying the tech do pay taxes, they may get certain deductions for research and development, including data center construction.

Photo by Geoffrey Moffett on Unsplash

The builders behind data centers are using terms like “publicly-owned” to create the illusion that some of the data campuses belong to all of us. All it means is that a number of them, including this proposal, would be paid for by the government (at least in Canada). Unless it’s a public company with shareholders (which OpenAI hopes to be soon), don’t expect any monetary returns. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you get a seat at the table discussing where their data centers will be constructed.

But it seems the public doesn’t actually want these behemoth buildings and is pushing back over noise and pollution concerns that go unaddressed.

Punishing the non-believers

When faith took hold in Western society, especially as religious freedom was ratified, churches popped up everywhere across a young United States. They were places people went to connect with the God(s) that dictated their daily lives, who made the harvest bountiful, who loved them under all circumstances. Even if they were thieves.

AI companies have already stolen a lot of human capital to build their empires, but many have already forgiven them for blessing society with this new “tool” in the interest of advancement.

Just like Christians used the Bible to justify slavery, tech oligarchs are promising a more prosperous future if you support their cause. But more prosperous for whom? Unless there’s a fundamental shift in the class system, the top will benefit the most as per usual–enough to fund a trip to Mars, or even build data centers in space. Here’s some propaganda to support the latter plan.

And this is why AI feels different from past technological advancements. The printing press, which is commonly brought up by AI proponents claiming it’s no different, was a machine that people could understand. Yes, it revolutionized industry, but, like most tech advances, it is easy to explain.

Even the internet, which was a massive digital transformation, was different from AI. The internet does not have any awareness of itself, unlike AI agents–even if that “awareness” is artificial. AI can reason using what it has learned, leading some to believe it’s sentient (or will be); the internet cannot. It can only connect you to web addresses with names behind them.

Photo by Gift Habeshaw on Unsplash

Those who have fully embraced AI will tell the skeptics like me that we’re wrong about it. That we’ll get left behind to die if we don’t buy in. That strikes the same chords as conversations with people trying to convince me of the church’s virtues, which makes my eyes roll involuntarily.

Most of us commoners won’t see behind the curtain of AI, and even if we did, we’d have a hard time explaining it to someone else. Even some AI engineers cannot explain how their AI system works, which gives it the illusion that artificial intelligence has surpassed us–which it has, in some ways.

The point is that AI is being sold to us as a divine entity that is ready to soothe a restless soul or solve a complex problem at work, whether it’s 3 a.m. or 3 p.m. Meanwhile, worshippers are so drawn to the technology that they don’t realize what they’re losing in the process–it could be their ability to reason, or even their sanity.

Sound familiar?

Tech leaders say the next iteration of AI will allow humans to achieve anything, but they don’t actually want that for us. They will try to stop any attempt by peasants to construct a biblical Tower of Babel.

In other words, they want AI’s divinity to remain a concept that can be sold, not a reality. They plan to remain at the top, unless their own God destroys them.