Your argument relies on moral outrage and abstract ethics rather than material analysis. You frame the issue as data centres harm poor communities, corporations are bad, therefore AI is immoral. That is ethical idealism. A dialectical materialist approach instead asks who owns the technology, who controls the surplus, which class gains power from it, and how it transforms relations of production. Without those questions, the analysis never moves beyond surface impressions.

Calling something a multibillion-dollar conglomerate is not an analysis. The decisive issue is which state and which class structure directs it. A Chinese firm operating within China’s socialist market economy is part of a system defined by state planning, public ownership in commanding sectors, industrial policy, and long-term national development goals. This is not comparable to Silicon Valley venture capital, US defense-linked monopolies, or rent-seeking finance capital. The size of capital does not determine its class character, and treating all large-scale production as inherently capitalist ignores the actual structure of the Chinese system.

This specific example fits into the broader Chinese development model as a whole. That system has produced clear and measurable benefits for the Chinese people through rapid industrialization, infrastructure construction, rising living standards, and the elimination of absolute poverty. Internationally, it has helped create a new multipolar pole that weakens imperial monopoly over development financing and technology. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, China has enabled massive infrastructure construction across the Global South, including railways, ports, power generation, telecommunications, and logistics networks that Western capital refused to build because profit rates were too low.

Those outcomes are not ideological claims but material facts. Over 900 million people were lifted from poverty, China built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, expanded its national energy grid, upgraded its industrial base, and achieved a high degree of technological self-reliance. The BRI has provided long-term financing and physical infrastructure across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, helping countries escape dependence on IMF austerity and underdevelopment. This is development rooted in productive investment, not charity or branding.

The question of data centres in Malaysia is a separate issue and must be analyzed materially rather than morally. Infrastructure hosting is not exploitation in itself. What matters is whether it produces domestic employment, technology transfer, tax revenue, energy upgrades, and integration into higher stages of production. Those concrete relations determine whether such projects deepen dependency or contribute to development, not abstract condemnation of infrastructure as such.

Your idea of social good treats socialism as distribution without production. Universal healthcare cannot exist through moral assertion alone. It requires trained doctors, hospitals, logistics systems, energy supply, and industrial surplus. Industrial surplus requires advanced productive forces. China’s path was to build that material base first and then expand social provision on top of it, which is precisely why those programs became sustainable rather than rhetorical.

There is also a sharp irony in an Irish person(going off your username please correct me if I'm wrong) directing moral condemnation at the Chinese development model. Ireland has been governed for roughly a century by the Fianna Fáil–Fine Gael blueshirt uniparty, which has steadily sold out the Irish working class in the interests of foreign capital. The result is an economy structured around tax haven status for US multinationals, with little industrial sovereignty and minimal democratic control over production. While corporate profits soar on paper, living conditions deteriorate. The healthcare system remains in permanent crisis, homelessness continues to rise year after year, housing is treated as a speculative asset rather than a social necessity, and rent-seeking dominates large sections of the economy.

This situation persists in part because there is no real organized proletarian opposition capable of challenging the political consensus. Power circulates within the same narrow elite, allowing political failsons like Simon Harris to rise steadily through the state apparatus despite repeated incompetence. Billions of taxpayer euros are burned on disasters such as the National Children’s Hospital, emblematic of a system where public funds are privatized through mismanagement while accountability is nonexistent. At the same time, energy-intensive American data centres continue to expand across the country with minimal scrutiny.

In this context, condemning China’s development model rings hollow. China subordinates capital to national development through planning and state direction, while Ireland has subordinated society to capital under a neoliberal uniparty regime.