Conceptual analysis reveals the physical and ecological costs of artificial intelligence infrastructure in leisure spaces, highlighting the need for materialist scholarship.
Although it may not feel like it, everyday use of artificial intelligence (AI) is not a disembodied experience. Far from its dominant presentation as diffuse, immaterial, and invisible, the data centers required to accommodate AI’s ever-expanding use and capabilities exist in time and space, often to the material detriment of the communities surrounding them. The materiality of AI lies in its dependence on and rearrangement of tangible physical elements and its tangible physical impacts on people and the environment. In this essay, we use a materialist analysis to outline some of AI’s major materialist interactions in leisure, with a focus on data centers and their extraction from the nonhuman natural world and human labor. We conclude with some of our own lingering ideas and questions regarding the need for materialist analyses of AI in leisure scholarship.
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Schmidt et al. (2026) studied this question.
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