Ellen P. Goodman / Aug 19, 2026In an aerial view, the 1,000 acre Meta El Paso Data Center as of August 13, 2026 in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)Among the many slippery bits of Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto is this: “superintelligence-for-all” empowerment will never happen if Meta and other hyperscalers monopolize compute. Control over compute is a tool of domination as powerful as any of the frontier model secret weights that Zuckerberg slags.The Atlantic’s Will Oremus observes wryly that in the manifesto, “a man who single-handedly commands a $1.5 trillion tech giant comes out as a critic of corporate power.” Platformer’s Casey Newton notes that while Zuckerberg “celebrates individual voices and democracy,” his company “is working to warp the democratic process through secretive data center deals.” Through those deals, Meta is trying to catch up with the other four hyperscalers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle), who together reportedly own more than 70% of the world’s AI compute. Zuckerberg doesn’t talk about this source of power. Instead, he focuses further up the stack on models and applications. Here, he says, “[r]ather than centralizing superintelligence, we should distribute it widely and give every person the ability to direct it.”But what about the physical infrastructure needed to produce that superintelligence? Infrastructure power is technology power. The Commerce Department’s NTIA, in its 2024 report on open weight models (p.30)…

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