WHO SHE IS

• TIME magazine’s List of 100 Most Influential Voices on AI.

• An investigative journalist who has spent years inside the AI industrial complex—then stepped back to map its true costs.

• Now a leading independent voice dissecting Silicon Valley’s most secretive empire and its anointed ruler: OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. 

• As AI becomes a powerful and ubiquitous presence in our lives, her bestselling book, Empire of AI, reveals how artificial intelligence is being built, who pays the price, and who reaps the rewards. 

WELCOME TO 21ST CENTURY’S EAST INDIA COMPANY

• Hao argues that modern AI mirrors older empires, framing it as a form of digital colonialism— extractive, asymmetrical, and global. 

• Data is mined like oil. Labour is outsourced like sweatshops. Environmental costs are offloaded to communities far from boardrooms and balance sheets.

• She lays out the physicality of a virtual phenomenon: From millions of ghost workers in Nairobi, Manila, Bogota and India labelling violent, graphic, explicit content for pennies, to massive data centers bang in the middle of vulnerable Mexican and Chilean geographies reshaping water usage and power grids — all for multi-million dollar companies. 

THE CULT OF SCALE 

• Hao is among the few journalists who has methodically tracked OpenAI’s transformation: From a nonprofit promising shared benefit, to a closed, profit-driven juggernaut.

• Her work captures the essence of 21st century’s tech-tonic shifts: erosion of safety-first ethics; consolidation of decision-making around broligarchs; sidelining of criticism and ethicists; and the logic of “scale at all costs” that now defines frontier AI. 

• She has reframed the central myth of the industry: that more data, more compute and more secrecy equals progress. Instead, Hao shows how scale only works to concentrate power and aggravates world-changing risks.

• Sam Altman has accused her — albeit indirectly — of “twisting” facts in her book.

WHO MAKES AI WORK?

• Another important frontier that Hao traces through her work is the people who make AI “safe”. They don’t sit in Silicon Valley. They don’t sit in tech hubs. They don’t sit on company boards. They are often the poorest, least protected people in the global economy. Earning pennies from a multi-million dollar empire. 

• Data labourers exposed to graphic violence and abuse. Suffering from the psychological toll of filtering humanity’s worst content so we as consumers never have to see it. 

• The global data annotation market was valued at an estimated US $8.22 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a ~26% annual rate through 2030. But the average annotator in a developing country only earns between $1.7 – $5 per hour. 

WHAT MAKES AI WORK?

• There are over 11,800 data centers operating worldwide as of 2024–2025, powering the AI revolution. Large data centers can draw as much electricity as mid-sized cities. Typical AI-centric hyperscale facilities can consume as much electricity annually as 100,000 households. 

• Hao cites figures suggesting that future AI computing infrastructure growth could require enormous energy capacity, including some planned facilities that would draw power in the 1,000–2,000 megawatt range — about 1.5–2.5 times the energy demand of a city like San Francisco. 

• Hao connects the placement of data centers in water-stressed communities — such as arid regions in Chile or parts of the U.S. Southwest — with broader systems of resource extraction that mirror historical imperialism. 

• She notes that these facilities are often built where land, energy, and water are cheapest or least regulated, which can exacerbate local environmental stress and inequality.

AT SYNAPSE 

Karen Hao will pull back the curtain on the AI:

• How OpenAI became an empire.

• Why Sam Altman matters — and why he shouldn’t be mythologized.

• How data workers, energy systems, and geopolitics are shaping intelligence itself.

• And why the most important question about AI is no longer what it can do — but what it is doing to us.

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