In the remote hinterland of central Washington, around 150 miles east of Seattle, the Grand Coulee Dam cuts through the narrow valley of the Columbia River. Since 1942, the river has plunged 380 feet through its turbines, generating up to seven gigawatts of electrical energy. The hydroelectric dam, which remains the largest power plant in the United States, was approved for construction in 1933 by the New Deal–era Works Progress Administration. The folk singer Woody Guthrie, who was tasked with producing an entire album about it, praised it as the eighth wonder of the world.

A few dozen miles downriver, in Quincy, Washington, another major technological marvel is taking shape. Here, OpenAI, perhaps the world’s best-capitalized start-up, is training mathematical models in a data center where some observers see the spark of artificial consciousness glowing. Others suspect the site to be a satanic mill of a coming industrial revolution, gunning for the jobs of service-sector and creative workers worldwide.

The location of the data center on the Columbia River is no coincidence: in Quincy, close to America’s largest power plant, electricity costs just 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. OpenAI’s tens of thousands of graphics cards consume huge amounts of it. The demand for a single experiment can now run into the gigawatt hours, and a large number of test runs are usually undertaken to develop a new model. ChatGPT is backed by an immense amount of resources — and an investment volume of $10 billion, which Microsoft and investors like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have injected into the project.