Fake food labs can clear farming land for data centers, wind farms & solar panels: perspective
The World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos,” concludes with a focus on fake food, putting a value on nature, and prepping for a robot invasion.
The WEF Summer Davos meeting took place June 23-25 in Dalian, China, and here is a Sociable summary of what went down.
First up, we see that fake food labs can reduce the amount of land needed for growing crops and raising livestock, so all the habitable land can be used for data centers, solar panels, and wind farms.
On the fake food agenda, we have Kathleen Alexander, who is the co-founder and CEO of Savor — a Bill Gates-backed company that fabricates fake fats in a factory that have never been proven to have any of the micronutritional value of real butter.
For Alexander, thermo-chemcially created fake fats and oils are about reducing the habitable land and energy that goes into traditional farming towards a more synthetic and sustainable solution.
“Our food system today uses about 50 percent of the habitable land on the planet. It’s 20-30 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions; 70 percent of fresh water withdrawals, and we can reduce all of those by 50-100 percent”
Kathleen Alexander, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, June 2026
In her own words, Alexander doesn’t want habitable land to be used for producing real food. She said that land could be reduced by 50-100 percent.
Savor’s chemical products contain neither milk nor cream, and are therefore not butter by definition.
At Summer Davos, Alexander explained that the idea to create fake fats and oils came from a top-down approach that started with the question, “What is food?”
After mapping out molecules, nutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, the company decided on working with fats and oils as they stood out the most as “being uniquely macro-nutrient that we could produce using processes that humans have already invented.”
Those processes are the same that go into the production of industrial chemicals.
Nutritional value is not the main selling point here, but rather, taste, texture, and reduced carbon emissions.
It’s a net-zero type of goal that just so happens to benefit the largest owner of US farmland and close confidant of Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates.
Speaking of which, ex-WEF president and CEO Borge Brende was forced to resign in February due to his connections with Epstein, and yet WEF founder Klaus Schwab, who was also ousted from the forum he founded after being found not having committed any wrongdoing in unrelated matters, still counts Bill Gates among his friends, despite Gates’s deep relationship with Epstein.
Go figure!
Fake food isn’t about making humans healthier from a dietary standpoint, but it does have the potential to destroy the livelihoods of farmers.
So, what’s to become of all that land used to feed over eight billion people on the planet?
Enter Fortescue founder Andrew Forrest.
Speaking on the Summer Davos panel called “Nature Is Infrastructure,” Forrest said that governments should encourage companies to “build everything off-grid” — meaning, to take all the habitable land, all the prime agricultural land — millions and millions of hectares — and just fill it all with data centers, solar panels, wind farms, and mining facilities — all for the good of the planet.
“We have to rid the world of fossil fuel […] Burning it? Do it if you’ve got no choice. If you’re going to die, do it, but if you’ve got a perfectly legitimate choice, if you’ve got data centers which are plugging into the grid — that’s just lazy,” said Forrest.
“Governments allow data centers to plug into the grid and into the water mains and drive up the cost of energy when they can even more easily and commercially — if you encourage them — go off-grid where there is masses of space. I’m talking millions of hectares to put solar panels, to put wind farms, to put data centers, to put mining, but don’t do what governments insist on doing which is subsidizing fossil fuels”
Andrew Forrest, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, June 2026
Forrest didn’t specifically mention “habitable” or “prime agricultural” land in his verbal manifesto, but that’s exactly where the data centers, solar panels, and wind farms are being placed.
If we go back two years to the 2024 Summer Davos meeting in communist China, Australian National University School of Cybernetics director Katherine Daniell said that data centers had to be built on “prime agricultural land,” and would consume enormous amounts of energy and water.
“If we’re going to develop new data centers, they’re likely to go in prime agricultural land; they’re likely to require a whole lot of water, energy systems”
Katherine Daniell, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, 2024
And what modern WEF meeting would be complete without calling for putting prices on nature itself?
During the same “Nature Is Infrastructure” session, WEF interim co-chair Andre Hoffmann said that we couldn’t just let nature be like a museum — nature has to be part of the value creation process!
“We can’t put nature into a museum. Nature has to be a part of what we’re doing […] We need to put a value into it because it needs to be part of the value creation process”
Andre Hoffmann, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, June 2026
Putting a price on everything in nature is a common theme at the WEF.
Going back two years to the 2024 WEF Summer Davos, we saw University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership CEO Lindsay Hooper, who told the panel on “Understanding Nature’s Ledger” that every part of the economy depends on nature, and that in order to protect natural systems, one solution would be to “bring nature onto the balance sheet.”
“We can’t do business on a dead planet. If we’re going to protect natural systems, one of the solutions is to bring nature onto the balance sheet“
Lindsay Hooper, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, 2024
This year’s Summer Davos also saw the release of the WEF’s annual “Top 10 Emerging Technologies” report, and this year, “World Models” made the list as being crucial for training AI robots how to operate in a three dimensional reality.
According to the latest report, World Models “ingest data from multiple sensory channels at once – video, depth sensors, pressure readings, motion capture – and compress these inputs into a single shared representational space.”
Speaking at this year’s Summer Davos press conference, Daniell said that of all the emerging technologies listed in the report, World Models was the one that surprised her most — one that she said was going to keep her up at night.
“The one that surprised me most was World Models […] I think is the one that’s going to keep me up at night”
Katherine Daniell, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, June 2026
World models could also “move AI from observing or simulating operations to actively informing decisions in real-world physical settings. As that happens, organizations will need clearer ways to test, govern and hold these systems accountable,” according to the report.
Then as the technology matures, “industries built on skilled physical judgement, including logistics, construction, manufacturing and elder care, could see their workforces change. The institutions that retrain and redeploy people as roles evolve will help determine how productivity gains are shared.”
Speaking of the coming robot invasion, our acceptance of robots will be based on our feelings towards them rather than their actual functions, according to another session at this year’s Summer Davos.
Giving the keynote presentation during the session called “Robots in Rhythm with Us,” Atonaton founder Madeline Gannon addressed the fears and anxieties that humans have over the coming robot invasion.
For her, “Automation reminds us of our own potential for obsolescence,” but her silver lining is that automation is not inevitable but rather intentional, and that at any moment, “We can decide to choose different.”
Gannon believes that our acceptance and adoption of robots — which are built by corporations and run on AI models that they developed — is just a matter of how they will make us humans feel.
“What I think we’re missing in the robotics world, and in the technology world in general, is that the future is not really going to be about function — what the robots do — it’s really going to be about feeling the experience of these machines”
Madeline Gannon, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, June 2026
“For mass adoption, for mass acceptance, how they make us feel is going to be more important. As the hardware gets commoditized, as the models get commoditized, the only differentiating factor is going to be the experience of these machines”
Madeline Gannon, WEF Annual Meeting of the New Champions, June 2026
At the 2026 WEF Annual Meeting in January, Elon Musk predicted that he’d be selling humanoid robots commercially by the end of 2027 as that’s when they’d be highly reliable, safe, and have a great range of function.
With the end of 2027 being the projected date for the start of humanoid robot sales, Musk predicted that eventually everyone on earth would have a robot.
This year’s 17th annual World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions took place from June 23-25 in communist China.
According to the AMNC overview, “The meeting will bring together leaders from business, government, civil society, academia, and the entrepreneurial community to explore how innovation and emerging technologies can unlock new growth models and drive positive economic momentum. It will also offer insights into the economic outlook of key emerging markets, with a particular focus on China and the broader Asian region.”
You can check out the WEF website for the entire list of panels and speakers.
Image Source: AI generated with ChatGPT
