The AI industry’s demand for electricity has outstripped the power industry’s capacity to deliver. Bloomberg says two data centers sit idle, waiting for more power to come online. To meet their growing need for power, AI companies are taking power generation into their own hands.
One data center in Texas is bolting old jet engines to racks and spinning them up to generate additional power.
Google announced that they are blasting racks of AI chips into space to harness solar energy from satellites with a project they are calling Suncatcher.
These massive data centers are noisy so there is a very real “quality of life” concern when a big data center moves into town.
I remember visiting an NTT data center in silicon valley during the mid-2000s. It was in one of the many low slung, nondescript office park buildings you see on the side of the highway in places like San Bruno or Millbrae. You wouldn’t even notice anything different until you realized there are no windows.
We checked in and went through a high-security revolving door and then greeted the single employee who was on duty and gave us a tour of the racks of blinking CPUs. Everything was on a raised floor and the lighting was harsh florescent. There was no way to tell whether it was night or day. It was as if we were boarding a spaceship, completely detached from the world around it.
