The Pharaohs Built Pyramids—We Build Data Centers

Forbes

2 days ago

Aldie, VA - January 20:On what was recently farmland, Amazon data centers have been built as close ... More as 50 feet from residential houses in the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood on January 20, 2023, in Aldie, VA. A Microsoft data center is under construction in at top right. As the data center industry expands its footprint in Northern Virginia, often building massive commercial structures near residential neighborhoods, communities push back with their concerns.(Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, a sprawling 1.5 million square foot data center hums on the site of a long-shuttered steel mill. It offers no plumes of smoke, no visible workers—just server racks, a security guard or two, and a tax-exempt policy fiction that cost the state $75 million. Its purpose, to the Keystone State, is symbolic.
4,600 years ago and 5,800 miles away, the first pyramid emerged from the desert as much a radical act of statecraft as a feat of engineering. In the golden age of Egypt's Old Kingdom, each new pharaoh faced the same problem: how to prove he was as worthy, or indeed more worthy, of the throne as compared to his predecessor. Pharaoh Djoser built the first pyramid, his successor built bigger. Then came Sneferu, who built three. Khufu built the Great Pyramid—the largest building on earth for nearly 4,000 years.
And then, slowly, the building stopped.
Paper Legitimacy in Stone
What had begun as an architectural innovation became an arms race of ego and excess—each king, desperate to outshine the last, drained the treasury, strained labor systems, and redirected resources away from daily functioning of the state towards construction. Returns diminished, projects shrank, and the civilization collapsed into economic instability and political fragmentation.
By the end of the Sixth Dynasty, Egypt's centralized control bureaucracy had begun to fracture. The state could no longer command vast labor forces and construction slowed to a crawl. The monuments that once signaled divine order could no longer be built. As the systems theorist John Gall once wrote, identifying the underlying systems at play in Egypt, 'Snofru, in expanding the scale, unwittingly exceeded the engineering limits.' His pyramid fell down.
His son, Cheops, built more carefully—but his strain wasn't merely architectural. Gall concludes: 'The Egyptian State, subjected to unbearable stresses by the building of these monsters of pride, collapsed into anarchy. Egypt fell down.'
To draw a causal line from pyramid-building to the fall of the Old Kingdom would be a stretch. Civilizations are rarely undone by a single habit or policy. But as allegory, the story is useful. It reveals how even the most advanced societies can exhibit symptoms of the underlying pathology—investment in spectacle at the expense of sustainability and allowing ambition and innovation to drift into excess. The pyramids were more than tombs; they stood as symbols of power, permanence, and political legitimacy. Over time, that symbolism demanded ever greater sacrifices of labor and resources, until the system that produced it could no longer bear the cost.
Modern Monuments
Today, American states are building monuments to excess of their own—not from limestone, but from steel, concrete, and server racks. The sacrifices demanded are not of labor, but tax revenue, electricity, and water. Across the country, governors and legislators are clamoring to offer ever more generous tax incentives to lure data centers to their state. Sprawling, resource-intensive facilities owned by some of the world's wealthiest tech firms, sprouting up in defiance from regions with power grid and water constraints.
These projects are pitched as engines of economic development and modernization. But, like the pyramids, their true value lies as symbols—proof the state that houses them is a competitive, forward-looking, and open for business. But when the realities of limited resources collide with the demands of symbolism, everyone loses.
Progress as Mirage
In ancient Egypt, signals of modernity and legitimacy entailed diverting grain, labor, and administrative capacity toward ever-larger monuments. Today, it means hollowing out tax bases, depleting aquifers, burdening already-strained electric grids, and subsidizing private infrastructure with public tax dollars. The shape of the monument has changed—in 2025 it has LED lights and makes kind of a whirring sound—but the political impulse remains the same.
Consider Pennsylvania, which quietly passed a law in 2016 exempting data centers from sales and use taxes. At the time, the projected annual cost was $75 million. In Texas, forecasts for similar exemptions swelled from $130 million to more than $1 billion in less than two years. These aren't one-off giveaways—more than 30 states now offer tax incentives for data centers, with many sporting automatic subsidy policies with little oversight and few long-term guarantees in terms of job creation or revenue growth.
And what do states get in return for these lavish subsidies? Often, some fiber optic cable and little else. Despite their massive physical footprint, most data centers don't actually employ that many full-time workers. The bulk of spending goes towards construction and equipment purchase, not long-term employment. That's kind of the whole deal with artificial intelligence, after all.
The Bill Comes Due
These facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, often requiring new outlays for infrastructure—paid, at least in part, by ratepayers and taxpayers. U.S. utilities have already requested $29 billion in electricity rate increases in the first half of 2025, which is up 142% from last year, primarily due to surging demand from data centers. In places like Virginia and California, lawmakers and residents are already beginning to push back, citing grid strain, environmental effects, and agreements that leave locals footing the bill while tech giants harvest the benefits.
So why, then, do states keep pursuing data center projects? Because, in the competition for prestige and plaudits, no one wants to be the first state to stop building. Much like the pharaohs who feared their legitimacy would be challenged if they were outshone by their predecessors, governors and lawmakers fear being perceived as uncompetitive, anti-tech, or not open to innovation.
And yet, every dollar spent luring a data center is one not spent fixing roads, upgrading water supply systems, or building affordable housing. The opportunity cost is hidden in the glow of server lights, but it's paid daily by residents whose basic needs continue to go unmet.
But when all else fails politically, a data center deal, even a bad one, offers the illusion of progress—a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a hardhat-clad walkthrough, a headline, and a chance to say the future is being built right here in Wherever-ville. It doesn't matter if the project creates ten jobs or ten thousand, what matters is the pastiche of growth.
This is the fundamental danger of governance by symbolism and posturing and what is portable from the lessons of the Old Kingdom. In both ancient Egypt and twenty-first century America, the impulse to build—bigger, faster, and flashier—can become decoupled from the needs of the people the state is intended to serve. The pyramid became less of a tomb and more of a billboard. The data center has become less a public investment and more a monument to political ambition and modernization. In both cases, the public pays the price when the foundation of legitimacy is built on the sands of spectacle rather than the bedrock of substance.
One day, centuries from now, someone might excavate the skeletal remains of a cloud facility on the edge of some forgotten exurb—its server halls fallen silent, its purpose long forgotten. They may wonder why so many resources were devoted to a structure that produced so little for the people that lived around it. The answer will be the same as it was in ancient Egypt: it wasn't built for them. It was built for the rulers, and for the illusion they were building something great.