INSIDE TODAY'S AI DATA CENTERS

THE DATA CENTER is getting a makeover. The nondescript industrial buildings once hummed away largely behind the scenes, powering the various facets of our online lives.

- BY SHARON GOLDMAN & NICOLAS RAPP

With AI, that's all changing. Companies like Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI are spending billions (with plans for trillions) to build a new breed of data center designed for the AI age: supersized behemoths with vast appetites for energy and water, and a far bigger impact on the communities where they are located.

That's because modern AI runs on vast clusters of tens of thousands of heavy, power-hungry graphics processing units (GPUs) running continuous calculations to train, or run, AI models, not traditional consumer or enterprise applications. Those clusters generate intense heat that demands industrial-scale cooling and direct access to large amounts of power, land, and water.