Data Centers: The Tower or The Wall
Pope Leo XIV echoes Pope Leo XIII – will we heed the call this time?
They chose the cheapest land they could find — flat, remote, far from anyone likely or able to object. Then they raised a hall with no windows, as big as two aircraft carriers, surrounded by concrete and a black steel fence. It drinks from the county’s water. It pulls from the county’s grid. It returns a number on a tax form. Inside, it computes. Few in the town will ever walk through its doors, but everyone will feel its impact.
Earlier this week, Pope Leo XIV called for all of humanity to respond to the start of the AI age just as Leo XIII had before him at the opening of the machine age. Our Leo reached past our windowless hall to an older building to make his appeal: a tower on a plain, raised by people who set out to make a name for themselves. People who believed they needed nothing and no one beyond their own kind and their own materials. That story ends the way pride stories always end. In ruin. The language breaks. The work scatters. The people walk away from each other.
Leo XIV told another story. A ruined city and a man named Nehemiah who refused to rebuild it on his own. Nehemiah called his neighbors together and asked each to rebuild a length of the fallen walls. He listened to their fears and learned what they needed. He matched the work to the people. He rebuilt the relationships before they rebuilt the walls. Together, they rebuilt the city. And because every family built a piece of it, they then cared for it together.
Between those two stories sits one idea: technology is never neutral. It takes on the character of whoever designs it, builds it, and runs it. The tower and the city are built with the same stone. What changes is who decided and who participated.
We’ve Been Here Before
Pride in the old story isn’t wealth or arrogance. It’s self-sufficiency — the conviction that you can raise the whole thing on your own terms, owing nothing, needing no one, pushing every cost outward onto the plain. The windowless hall runs on that same conviction. It’s designed to take what it needs from the place it stands in, and to give relatively nothing back. A building like that makes a name for some. But it doesn’t make neighbors.
We have seen this play out before. In 1891, Leo XIII watched factories swallow farmland and families whole. In his encyclical he wrote that workers carried a dignity the market kept forgetting.
His call for action was right. Our response came late.
We let the towers climb for another forty years until we fell into a depression and a war. Only out of that rubble did we build what Leo had asked for: the fair wage, the union, the weekend, the plain idea that an economy serves people not the other way around.
That is the part worth acknowledging at this moment. Last time it took a collapse to make us build together. Our response was late, partial, and reversible — we have spent the last few decades letting it slip away.
Today’s Towers of Babel
The strange windowless halls going up across the countryside faster than the towns around them can vote reflect the image of a few dozen people in the industry. They decide what data centers are or are not. People who are so far up the tower they can no longer see the ground clearly. They can’t hear the townspeople over the din of the diesel engines.
Being on the edges of the industry though, closer to the ground than the clouds and the gods, my team and I could see and hear our neighbors. Thirty of us, from seven companies, asked what Nehemiah might ask: what does a data center need to be to be welcomed by each place?
We asked that question of hundreds of people — and other life — all over the world. Then designed an answer.
It runs small and close instead of vast and remote. Its heat doesn’t vanish into the sky — it warms homes, feeds greenhouses, and helps the water of its place flow. Its power speaks to the grid instead of straining against it. The people who live beside it sit at the table before the siting is decided, not after the permits are filed. Each neighbor, old and new, builds a section of the wall. Not one of them can finish it alone.
That is what we call the Regenerative Datacenter of the Future. It’s the product of mutual benefit by design.
One Stone for Our Home
Leo wrote his letter to everyone — believer or not, the whole human family. He asks a human question under all the theology: will we build to make a name, or to make a home? I can’t answer that for the entire AI industry. I can only answer for my stretch of the wall. Energy, water, ecology and the concrete and steel halls we keep raising on top of them. For whatever reason, that’s where I landed, so that’s the section I’ll help build a better way — as though the dignity of all life were true, because it is.
The tower builders say we need them more than they need us. The city builders — community builders — say we need each other. History has shown us which one collapses under its own weight, and which holds a place and its people together.
I am just one stone holder, but I’ve got friends and neighbors. As do you. Together, maybe we can heed the call of this Leo, skip the depression and war this time, and lay the foundations of an age that is golden for us all.
Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft
This piece connects directly to four frameworks from the book:
Innovating With Everyone — Nehemiah didn’t hold a stakeholder meeting — he called his neighbors together and gave each family a section to own. The seven-company coalition that designed the Regenerative Data Center operated on Pattern #3’s central premise: engage early, engage widely, engage with empathy. Meet people where they’re at and move forward together.
Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Outside-In — The windowless hall is a pure top-down artifact — decisions made in rooms far from the plain, ignoring the ground-level feedback and community signals coming in. The Regenerative Data Center inverted this deliberately: designed from the bottom up, with hundreds of outside-in voices, human and otherwise.
Aim for Positive — A data center that takes from the county’s water, pulls from the county’s grid, and returns a number on a tax form is aiming for less bad. The Regenerative Data Center aimed for abundance — heat returned to homes, power that steadies the grid, ecology restored, economy supported — mutual benefit by design, not compliance.
Language as Strategic Tool — Leo XIV’s encyclical is a masterclass in strategic language: naming “Babel” and “Nehemiah” rewrites what builders optimize for before they pick up a stone. “Mutual benefit by design” and “each neighbor builds a section” work the same way — deliberate terminology that reframes what a coalition believes is possible, and then makes possible.
Sources
1. Leo XIII. “Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor.” Vatican, May 15, 1891. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
2. Leo XIV. “Magnifica Humanitas.” Vatican, May 15, 2026. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Written with AI assistance. The thinking — and the stretch of wall — are mine.
