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The consequences extend beyond individual data centers. On November 28, 2025, the CME Group—operator of the world’s largest derivatives exchange—experienced a complete trading halt. Treasury futures, energy markets, agricultural contracts—90 percent of global derivatives volume went dark. The cause was not a cyberattack. It was not software failure. A cooling system failed at a data center in Aurora, Illinois. The machines that price risk for the global economy exceeded their thermal limits.
The CME had sold that data center in 2016 for 130 million dollars and leased it back. When the cooling failed, CME owned nothing. It controlled nothing. It waited, like everyone else, for someone else to fix the pipes.
This single incident illuminates a truth that financial markets have not yet fully absorbed: the limit on computational throughput is not processing power. It is heat rejection capacity. The engine of global price discovery was built on silicon that melts.
Oh, yeah, these wealthy companies will totally keep the losses contained to their own cash-flows, they're definitely not gonna try and force the public to foot the bill.
but not from a “we’re gonna have the three mile island incident part deux” view. People’s energy bills are through the roof, everything is pointing towards needing reduced energy usage, and what’s the government doing about it? Giving Microsoft a loan to get their own personal nuclear reactor so Copilot can write a stilted response email for the useless middle managers of the world.