The data center industry is booming, as cloud providers seek to scale up their services to keep pace with demand driven by AI. In Texas, the boom is particularly bountiful. Outside of Virginia, there is no other place in the U.S. with a higher concentration of server farms than the Lone Star state (it has […]
Google Exec Claims Company Needs to Double Its AI Serving Capacity ‘Every Six Months’: Report
Tech companies are racing to build out their infrastructure as their increasingly resource-intensive AI products gobble up capacity, clean out chipmakers’ supply, and require more power. Google, once dubbed the “King of the Web,” is one of those companies, and a high-level exec for The Big G is reported to have told staff that the […]
Elon Musk’s xAI Is Getting a Fancy 500-Megawatt Data Center in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia appears to be fully engaged in a MAGA-washing campaign, buddying up to the Trump administration and its hangers-on to improve its image for billionaires to do business there. It appears to be working. At a US-Saudi investment forum hosted on Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, xAI, will build a 500-megawatt […]
You May Have to Move to Minnesota to Escape the Data Center Epidemic
Data centers are taking over the world, and the chances are high that someone is, at this very minute, planning to build one in (or near) your backyard. That’s because the AI boom is ongoing, and to produce AI, you need cloud, and to make cloud, you need rows upon rows of servers. There is […]
Small Towns Are Betting That the Data Center Boom Will Never End
What happens when data centers come to town? A whole lot, wanted or not. Tech firms are promising to pour trillions of dollars into building new data centers to continue powering the rapid growth of AI models, which means they are asking communities across the country if they are looking for new neighbors. According to […]
What’s Scarier Than a Haunted House? An AI Data Center
The owner of a haunted house in Pennsylvania has a new idea to spook his patrons: the eerie whirring of fans, the humming of electricity, and the looming specter of an overhyped speculative bubble doomed to pop. That’s right, he wants to build an AI data center, according to a report from Bloomberg. Derek Strine […]
An AI Data Center Is Coming for Your Backyard. Here’s What That Means for You
Elena Schlossberg and her husband bought their property in Prince William County, Virginia, in 2000. Over the years, the rise of artificial intelligence has transformed their bucolic community into a major hub for data centers, and Mrs. Schlossberg isn’t standing for it. Spurred to action by an Amazon Web Services data center project in 2014, […]
China Submerges a Data Center in the Ocean to Conserve Water. Is That Even a Good Idea?
Data centers like those used to train and run AI models have this irksome tendency to drain the local water supply for the purpose of cooling through heat exchange, sometimes worsening water scarcity in an area. They also suck down so much energy that they drive up demand, and it appears we may be paying […]
New Trump Administration Energy Rule Would Enable Data Centers with ‘Large Loads’
Data centers are being built with unprecedented gusto all over the U.S. The reason for this is fairly well known: the AI business requires gargantuan amounts of electricity and computing power. Every time you use an app like DALL-E to, say, make one of those dumb AI-generated images of Mickey Mouse committing the 9/11 terrorist […]
What’s Powering All These Futuristic Data Centers? In Many Cases Repurposed Jet Engines
AI needs a lot of energy, and from Sam Altman, to Bill Gates, to Peter Thiel, tech billionaires with heavy involvement in AI tend to also invest in the futuristic energy moonshot that is nuclear fusion. But the giant, energy-sucking data centers of today are powered by the energy sources of today, including—it turns out—sputtering […]