Billion-Dollar Data Centers Are Taking Over the World

"When Sam Altman said one year ago that OpenAI's Roman Empire is the actual Roman Empire, he wasn't kidding. In the same way that the Romans gradually amassed an empire of land spanning three continents and one-ninth of the Earth's circumference, the CEO and his cohort are now dotting the planet with their own latifundia-not agricultural estates, but AI data centers."

"Tech executives like Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison are fully bought in to the idea that the future of the American (and possibly global) economy are these new warehouses stocked with IT infrastructure. But data centers, of course, aren't actually new. In the earliest days of computing there were giant power-sucking mainframes in climate-controlled rooms, with co-ax cables moving information from the mainframe to a terminal computer."

"A decade later, "the cloud" became the squishy infrastructure of the internet. Storage got cheaper. Some companies, like Amazon, capitalized on this. Giant data centers continued to proliferate, but instead of a tech company using some combination of on-premise servers and rented data center racks, they offloaded their computing needs to a bunch of virtualized environments. ("What is the cloud?" a perfectly intelligent family member asked me in the mid-2010s, "and why am I paying for 17 different subscriptions to it?")"

Sam Altman and other tech leaders are building global networks of AI data centers likened to modern latifundia. Data centers evolved from early power-hungry mainframes in climate-controlled rooms to massive internet-era facilities and later to cloud-based virtualized environments. The consumer internet boom of the late 1990s accelerated the proliferation of large facilities near hubs like Washington, DC. Cloud adoption lowered storage costs and enabled companies like Amazon to scale infrastructure services. Tech firms amassed petabytes of user and enterprise data and developed methods to mine and structure Big Data. Current investments prioritize warehouses of IT infrastructure to support AI workloads and economic growth.

Read at WIRED