The Speed of Burn

Article by Paul Quigley

It takes the Earth hundreds of millions of years to create usable energy.

It takes us milliseconds to burn it.

That imbalance between nature’s patience and our speed has quietly become one of the defining forces of our time.

All the power that moves our civilization began as light. Every joule traces back to the Big Bang, carried forward by the sun, stored in plants, pressed into fuels, and now released again as electricity. The current that runs through a data center today began its journey billions of years ago… ancient energy returning to motion through modern machines.

And what do we do with it? We turn it into data.

Data has become the fastest-growing form of energy use in human history. We are creating it faster than we can process, understand, or store it. The speed of data now rivals the speed of light itself, and it far exceeds our ability to assign meaning to it.

The result is a civilization burning geological time to produce digital noise.

The Asymmetry of Time

A hyperscale data center can take three to five years to design, permit, and build. The GPUs inside it process information measured in trillionths of a second. That mismatch; years to construct, microseconds to consume, defines the modern paradox of progress. We are building slower than we burn.

Energy creation is slow. Data consumption is instantaneous. And between those two speeds lies a widening moral and physical gap.

When we run a model, render an image, or stream a video, we aren’t just using electricity. We’re releasing sunlight that’s been waiting since the dawn of life to be freed. The electrons are real, finite, and irreplaceable in any human timeframe. Yet, we treat data as limitless because its cost is invisible.

Less than 2% of all new data is retained after a year. 98% disappears — deleted, overwritten, or simply forgotten. Still, we build ever-larger servers to hold it. We cool them, power them, and replicate them endlessly. It’s as if we’ve confused movement with meaning.

The Age of the Cat-Video Factory

We’ve built cat-video factories on the same grid that could power breakthroughs in medicine, energy, and climate.

There’s nothing wrong with joy or humor. Those things are a beautiful part of being human. But we’ve industrialized the trivial. We’re spending ancient energy to create data that doesn’t last the length of a memory. The cost isn’t measured in dollars; it’s measured in sunlight.

Every byte carries a birth certificate of energy. It may have traveled billions of years to arrive in your device, only to vanish in seconds. We are burning time itself, and we’re getting faster at it every year.

When Compute Outruns Creation

AI’s rise has made this imbalance impossible to ignore. A one-gigawatt data campus, power consumption that once was allocated to the size of a national power plant, can now belong to a single company. Each facility may cost tens of billions of dollars and consume electricity on par with small nations. We’ve reached a world where the scarcity of electrons defines the frontier of innovation.

It’s no longer the code that limits us; it’s the current.

The technology sector celebrates speed: faster training, faster inference, faster deployment. But nature doesn’t share that sense of urgency. Energy obeys the laws of thermodynamics, not the ambitions of quarterly growth. What took the universe 18 billion years to refine (the conversion of matter into usable light) we now exhaust at a pace that makes geological patience seem quaint.

This isn’t an argument against technology. It’s a reminder that progress without proportion becomes entropy. Efficiency without stewardship turns intelligence into heat.

The Stewardship of Light

There’s a better lens for understanding this moment. One that blends physics with purpose.

If all usable power began in the Big Bang and continues as sunlight, then every act of computation is a continuation of that ancient light’s journey. To waste data is to interrupt that journey; to use it well is to extend it. Stewardship, then, isn’t just environmental — it’s existential.

In finance, CFOs use Return on Invested Power, ROIP to judge whether the energy they buy translates into profitable compute and operational output. But there’s a deeper layer worth considering: a moral ROIP. Beyond the dollars, what kind of intelligence are we generating from the power we consume? Are we creating breakthroughs in medicine, energy, and climate, or simply building larger cat-video factories?

Both forms of ROIP matter. One measures financial return on electrons; the other measures human return on enlightenment. Together, they remind us that every watt carries two ledgers: one economic, one ethical.

We can’t slow AI’s acceleration. But we can bring its metabolism back into proportion. That begins with awareness… the humility to see that our data has ancestry, that our machines are burning the oldest relics of the cosmos. Once you see that, every click, every model, every watt takes on new weight.

The Pause Before Progress

Perhaps our next revolution isn’t speed at all. Perhaps it’s stillness, the mere ability to pause and ask whether the next byte we create honors the journey of the photons that power it.

The call isn’t to stop. It’s to think proportionally.

To remember that while energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning can.

And that the true measure of progress may not be how much faster we can turn power into data, but how much more wisely we can turn data into light again.

Sunlight is the power. Data is the shadow.

The question is whether our shadows are getting longer… or wiser.

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Paul Quigley

Paul’s career in the HVAC industry has spanned over 36 years, encompassing roles from contracting and distribution to C-Level positions in HVAC manufacturing. A significant aspect of his expertise lies in large-scale, high-demand cooling environments. At the beginning of the millennium, Paul gained international recognition as the co-designer of the largest VRF project in North America, alongside other notable projects across the US.

Paul joined AIRSYS Cooling Technologies, Inc. in 2021 as the company president. He is utilizing his wealth of experience to further broaden the AIRSYS vision of bringing speed to innovative and precise solutions, with a strong future emphasis on advanced cooling technologies for critical data center infrastructure.