INFORMATION OVERLOAD

Inside the data centers that train A.I. and drain the electrical grid.

- BY STEPHEN WITT

"I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers," Sam Altman said.

Drive in almost any direction from almost any American city, and soon enough you'll arrive at a data center—a giant white box rising from graded earth, flanked by generators and fenced like a prison yard. Data centers for artificial intelligence are the new American factory. Packed with computing equipment, they absorb information and emit A.I. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, they have begun to multiply at an astonishing rate.

The leading independent operator of A.I. data centers in the United States is CoreWeave, which was founded eight years ago, as a casual experiment. In 2017, traders at a middling New York hedge fund decided to begin mining cryptocurrency, which they used as the entry fee for their fantasy-football league. To mine the crypto, they bought a graphics-processing unit, a powerful microchip made by the company Nvidia. The G.P.U. was marketed to video gamers, but Nvidia offered software that turned it into a low-budget supercomputer.

Within a year, the traders had quit the hedge-fund business and bought several thousand G.P.U.s, which they ran from Venturo’s grandfather's garage, in New Jersey. After the cryptocurrency market crashed in 2018, CoreWeave acquired more microchips from insolvent miners. Before long, the firm had built a platform that allowed outside customers to access the G.P.U.s. Then, in 2022, Venturo came upon Stable Diffusion, an image-generation A.I. He fed the A.I. descriptions of different scenes, and it returned accurate, beautiful illustrations. "This is going to enrapture the entire world," Venturo remembers thinking.