Saudi Aramco Doesn’t Believe Its Own Rhetoric on Oil Demand
The petro giant protests too much. Rather than blaming environmentalists and ESG policies, it should open its checkbook and lift production if the future really is that bright.
A failing of animal spirits?
Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Imagine if Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg was to stand on a stage and lament that the world wasn’t building enough data centers.
Meeting our ever-growing demand for cloud storage (they might say) will require more and more racks of web servers; if we fail to produce them, the electronic systems on which modern society depends might break down. It’s hard to believe such a warning would be taken seriously if Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. weren’t spending the money to avert such a catastrophe. As some of the biggest players in the cloud, with the balance sheets to match, they should be treating the coming crisis as an opportunity.