Anthropic’s $1.8B cloud deal with Akamai reveals AI’s extractive infrastructure: monopolistic cloud control and energy colonialism in the Global South
Original framing: “Anthropic signs $1.8 billion AI cloud deal with Akamai, Bloomberg News reports - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
This deal echoes 19th-century railroad monopolies or 20th-century oil cartels, where infrastructure control enabled corporate dominance over entire economies. The cloud computing industry today mirrors the ‘plunder’ of the Industrial Revolution, with AI models acting as the new ‘refineries’ processing raw data into profit. Historical parallels also include the enclosure of the commons (e.g., land, spectrum) by tech oligarchs, repeating enclosures seen in feudal Europe.
Anthropic’s $1.
8B deal with Akamai is not merely a corporate transaction but a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis: the enclosure of digital infrastructure by a handful of tech oligarchs, replicating historical patterns of resource extraction and colonialism. The cloud’s material footprint—energy, water, land—disproportionately harms marginalised communities, while its governance remains opaque and unaccountable. Indigenous and Global South perspectives reveal this as a continuation of neo-colonialism, where ‘innovation’ is code for corporate expansion into new frontiers of exploitation. The solution lies in dismantling monopolistic control through public trusts, cooperative models, and Indigenous data sovereignty, while regulating AI’s environmental and social costs. Without these interventions, the deal’s ‘progress’ will deepen inequality, accelerate climate collapse, and entrench tech feudalism—where the few control the digital commons, and the many bear the consequences.