From the outside, this nondescript building in Piscataway, New Jersey, looks like a standard corporate office surrounded by lookalike buildings. Even when I walk through the second set of double doors with a visitor badge slung around my neck, it still feels like I'll soon find cubicles, water coolers and light office chatter.
Instead, it's one brightly lit server hall after another, each with slightly different characteristics, but all with one thing in common — a constant humming of power.
The first area I see has white tiled floors and rows of 7-foot-high server racks protected by black metal cages. Inside the cage structure, I feel cool air rushing from the floor toward the servers to prevent overheating. The wind muffles my tour guide's voice, and I have to shout over the noise for him to hear me.
Outside the structure, it's quieter, but there's still a white noise that reminds me of the whooshing parents used to get newborn babies to sleep. On the back of the servers, I see hundreds of cords connected — blue, red, black, yellow, orange, green. In a distant server, green lights are flashing. These machines, dozens of them, are gobbling electricity. In all, this building can support up to 3 megawatts of power.
This is a data center. Facilities like it are increasingly common across the US, sheltering the machinery that makes our online lives not only possible, but nearly seamless. Data centers host our photos and videos, stream our Netflix shows, handle financial transactions, and so much more. The one I'm visiting, owned by a company called DataBank, is modest in scope. The ones coming in one after another to suburban communities and former farmlands across the US, riding the tidal wave of artificial intelligence's swift advances, are monstrous.
CNET/Tharon Green
It's a building boom based on generative AI. In late 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and within two months, it had approximately 100 million users and had spurred a frantic scramble among the biggest tech companies and a host of newborn startups. Now, it has nearly 700 million active users each week and 5 million paying business users. We are inundated with chatbots, image generators and speculation about superintelligence looming in the not-too-distant future. AI is being woven into our everyday lives, from banking and shopping to education and language learning.
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and OpenAI are all spending massive amounts of money to drive that growth. The Trump administration has also made it clear that it wants the US to lead AI innovation across the globe.
"We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it," the White House said in July in a document called America's AI Action Plan, which calls for streamlined construction permitting and the removal of environmental regulations. "Simply put, we need to 'Build, Baby, Build!'"
Building, and building big, is very much on the mind of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He's been touting his company's plans for an AI data center in Louisiana, nicknamed Hyperion, that would be large enough to cover "a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan."
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