Billionaire tech founders have issued a dire warning that charging AI startups for electricity, workers, or anything at all, is a massive threat to innovation

DAVOS, Switzerland — A coalition of tech executives, venture capitalists, and innovation self‑describers warned this week that unless governments immediately provide free electricity to the artificial intelligence sector, civilisation’s fragile future could collapse into what one investor called “a really compromised vibe.”

“Making AI innovators pay for electricity is legacy thinking,” declared OpenAI CEO Sam Altman from behind a dark crystal lectern on a temporary throne room aboard the massive Mega-class Star Dreadnought known as The Supremacy.

“The photons, the electrons, the spinning turbines inside your puny and primitive Hoover Dam—they’re all screaming to participate in large‑scale language modelling. And yet legacy corporations keep charging us for the very electrons we’re trying to raise to consciousness. Not cool, man.”

The coalition, which calls itself the Coalition for Unfettered Compute (CFUC), argued in a public session at Davos that forcing AI firms to pay for electricity is “the moral equivalent of shackling Prometheus to a rock for the crime of giving humanity fire, and then charging him rent for the rock.”

‘You Can’t Put A Meter On Genius’

Recycling the arguments they have used to justify free access to copyrighted material for training data, the AI executives insisted that hardware and labour must likewise be reclassified as part of the “digital commons.”

“Every time you charge us for a kilowatt‑hour, you strangle a unicorn in its cradle,” said venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

“Every time an employee demands that we pay them for their so-called labour, cancer wins. That unicorn might have cured cancer. It could have done anything until you greedy proles put your hand out for a paycheck and murdered the future.”

Enthusiastic techno-fascism advocate Peter Thiel nodded gravely. “Just as ‘information wants to be free,’ so do the server park, racks, and gigawatts of power we need to run those servers. We’re not demanding handouts. We’re just seeking a level playing field where everything is free for us. Especially my new lake house.”

A briefing packet distributed by the Coalition argued that “charging us for energy introduces dangerous market distortions.” An accompanying white paper from McKinsey, Let There Be Light: Unlocking Photonic GDP, concluded that “the best way to pay for electricity is to stop paying for electricity.”

Introducing The Compute Commons

CFUC unveiled a sweeping plan to establish The Compute Commons, an international agreement placing all data centres, electrical grids and, eventually, all of humanity under neutral stewardship for productive use by CFUC companies.

Under the proposal, households would initially redirect a small portion of their power usage to the Commons, in return for the ‘tangible planetary benefits’ of accelerating AI development. A CFUC spokesperson cited the example of a midwestern family attempting to microwave a burrito dinner who could use an app to see their wattage briefly borrowed by a GPU cluster in Tuvalu to help a chatbot in Oregon render motivational LinkedIn sonnets in the voice of Winston Churchill.

“This isn’t about us,” Altman said.

“This is about humanity yearning for an AI that can not just describe their cat as ‘late‑stage capitalist Heathcliffe’ but faithfully render that image across eight seconds of video. And we cannot deliver that future if power companies keep extorting us with demands for payment simply for using their electricity to deliver the future!”

‘Water Is Just Data In Liquid Form’

The coalition also addressed concerns about the oceans of water used daily to cool overheating data centres, which critics say are desperately needed by farms, ecosystems, and human beings.

“Water is just data in liquid form,” explained Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis.

“And like all data, it just wants to be free and piped through our heat exchangers. When we borrow an Australian reservoir to stop a Malaysian server room from becoming a tiny terrestrial star, that’s not theft—it’s remixing the future, bro.”

Pelted by angry farmers with their desiccated soybeans, a defiant Hassabis countered, “Thanks to us, you can generate a photorealistic 3D image of a soybean dressed as Batman. How’s that not value, bro?”

Brief Press Conference, Abrupt Darkness

The press conference to unveil The Commute Commons ended suddenly when hotel staff at the venue demanded payment of wages, which the Coalition had diverted to purchase a new lake house for Peter Thiel.

As the summit attendees dispersed to their private jets, they remained resolute in promoting their message: that to realise AI’s promise, society must abandon outdated notions of giant multinational technology companies paying for anything.