Global dependence on the internet is broad, but it remains uneven. Around 6 billion people were online in 2025, while 2.2 billion remained offline. Internet use reached 74% of the world’s population, up from 71% a year earlier, making...
Across the world’s major data center markets, the AI energy debate has moved from alarm into design. Artificial intelligence is expanding the electricity footprint of the internet, but the defining question is no longer whether grids can keep up....
On a hot afternoon in a city classroom, a teacher opens an AI lesson planner, a student streams a lecture, a parent checks a school portal, and a district server stores another day of records. None of it looks...
Thomas still remembers how his grandfather worked a field before sunrise.
The day began with inspection, not data. He checked the irrigation cut with a shovel, walked the crop line by line, pressed soil between his fingers, and judged moisture...
The Connected Ocean
For most of modern economic history, the ocean has functioned as a vast blind spot—physically critical, commercially essential, yet informationally thin. Nearly 80% of it remains unmapped at high resolution, a reminder that scale, depth, and cost...
The internet economy is frequently described in language that makes it feel almost immaterial. Digital platforms host services in the cloud, commerce moves through global networks, and daily life increasingly unfolds through screens that appear detached from the physical...
Across continents and income levels, daily life now unfolds inside systems that appear immaterial yet depend on industrial-scale infrastructure. Roughly 5.35 billion people – 66 percent of the global population – are connected to the internet, spending an average...
Artificial intelligence is beginning to register on electricity systems the way heavy industry once did—suddenly, visibly, and at scale. Data centers consumed roughly 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity worldwide in 2022, and the International Energy Agency projects that figure...
E-waste in 2026 and the Physical Burden of Digital Growth
In 2022, the world generated about 62 million tons of e-waste – roughly 7.8 kilograms per person – and formally collected and recycled just over one fifth of it, even...
The Internet Economy’s Environmental Reckoning
By the end of 2025, the environmental footprint of the internet economy crosses a visible threshold. Digital systems no longer sit at the margins of ecological debate. They now appear in everyday conversations about electricity...
