What’s popping up faster than dandelions after a spring rain? Data Centers. Every city that has flat land available and isn’t already being dragged down by regular power brownouts is being earmarked for at least one new data center. Growth and development. That’s a good thing, right?
Maybe. When a new factory, hospital or shopping center comes to town it’s generally a sign of more prosperity for the community. Doesn’t a data center do the same thing by adding construction jobs to get built, full time operations jobs later and services that benefit the community? That should be the case, but these new data centers are a different breed. They’re moving in like a swarm of locusts, eating up massive amounts of power, water and land, making raucous noises and… they might just die shortly and litter the landscape with their carcasses.
What’s Different About AI Data Centers
What’s happened just recently is the AI boom… some say the AI bubble. It’s a mania about the adoption of artificial intelligence to supercharge business productivity and make everyone a creative genius, even with no talent. It’s hard to tell where this is really going because we’re in the early stages of the AI buildout. Artificial Intelligence is nothing if not a power hungry monster, both in terms of computing requirements and the energy it takes to run the chips and keep them cool.
If this were still an academic exercise at a few universities or cutting edge tech companies, it would be no big deal. But it’s not. It’s an all-out land rush, perhaps Dutch tulip craze redux. Businesses big and small are demanding the benefits of artificial intelligence enhanced processes before their competitors eat them alive. One data center is a nice addition to any business park or resurrected industrial wasteland. A couple of hundred proposed or under construction in a state, like in Illinois, has disaster potential.
Oh, The Problems They Are Causing
An immediate problem is that there just isn’t enough electricity to go around. Buildout of nukes, solar fields, wind farms and gas turbine peaker plants has languished due to industrial offshoring and energy efficiency, such as replacement of incandescent lights with LEDs. All of a sudden, new AI data centers demand megawatts and gigawatts that aren’t sitting idle. Many need new high voltage distribution to bring in that massive power. Somebody has to pay for all this new capacity and delivery and it’s showing up in everyone’s electric bills.
Cooling is another issue. Electronics is only so efficient and the power that doesn’t go into calculations is rejected as heat. If you’ve tried mining for bitcoin, you know that a few of these high power servers can give you heat stroke in a small apartment. Now, imagine thousands of servers with the fastest chips crammed into acres of equipment racks. Simple PC fans can’t handle the torrent of BTUs, so liquid cooling is employed. The cheap and easy method is to tap the municipal water supply or suck up cool well water from aquifers and then dump the hot water into the river. Abundant water then becomes a scarce resource and the steaming wastewater can overload municipal sewers or kill fish and grow algae.
Noise? What noise? Large cooling or AC fans can create a 24/7 background roar, but even worse is the turbine whine from on-site power generation. Some nearby residents also report a constant vibration that can drive you nuts. Diesel generators may be even worse at the scales needed to run these massive facilities. You’ve got the noise and you also get a dose of air pollution too. It’s no fun living next to a massive plant that doesn’t even shut down at night.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Rural and suburban residents and data centers don’t mix well. Does that mean AI is a no-go or that we just have to tough it out and accept the problems as the cost of progress?
I believe there are ways to make us all happy or at least satisfied. The key is in stopping AI from privatizing the benefits and socializing the costs. That means these robot brains are going to have to be good citizens and shoulder responsibility for the issues they are causing.
No, we are not all benefiting from having AI shoehorn its way into our lives. In fact, few of us are. The promise of AI is that it will bring new levels of productivity to business and create new products, such as cancer curing drugs. That’s somewhere down the road. Right now, the fever pitch is among software startups promoting their smartware and big tech companies competing to see who can get the most processing units online the fastest.
What results are we seeing? Strange artwork depicting people with three arms, deepfake audio and video that you can’t be sure it its real or not, inane online chatbots and automated receptionists that send you around in circles until you just go away, and job cuts from organizations that think they’ve seen the future. Oh, yes. Then there are the rising utility bills, strain on municipal resources and air & noise pollution to make this all happen.
But, let’s not be so negative. Like the Internet in the 90’s, AI is just getting started. A generation from now we may become so addicted to it that we could never go back. What we need to ensure is that we all benefit from this technology revolution and not let it just suck the joy out of life to feather the nests of a trillionaire elite.
Data Centers Must Pay Their Way
There are a couple of fundamental changes needed here. First, AI facilities need to become good corporate citizens. That means either having no impact on the community or, better yet, making a positive contribution.
Start with the environmental. Site these facilities either in the middle of nowhere or in devastated industrial areas. The advantage of re-purposing dilapidated factory sites is that few people live next door and those who do are use to industrial whirring and clanging at all hours. Massive utility hookups are likely onsite just waiting to be reactivated. Access roads are also in-place and perhaps only need a resurfacing. You’ll actually be doing rustbelt America a favor in cleaning up these abandoned manufacturing slums and moving them into the current century.
Bring your own utilities or pay for us to provide them. Those sprawling flat roofs that characterize data centers seem perfect for solar panels. Acres and acres of them add up to some pretty substantial megawatts. During the day anyway. Overnight, utilities aren’t so strained and may be able to keep a steady load by accommodating your nighttime needs. For backup power, batteries are the new generators and Elon Musk will be happy to sell you as many as you need. If still not enough, a gas turbine peaker plant may be justified. Municipalities can often accommodate whatever energy is needed as long as the zoning includes the facility paying the cost of building infrastructure and allowing the electrical utility to make use of any excess or backup energy to support the community.
By the way, these monster facilities may not last forever. In fact, the half-life of an AI data center may be measured in years, not decades. The technology is advancing so fast that new chips are be replacing older slower chips on a constant rotating basis. There are proposals now to move the entire infrastructure into low Earth orbit to take advantage of the constant sunlight for power and coldness of space for cooling. What happens to the data centers then? Do they become empty shells like abandoned factories that somebody else has to clean up? Decommissioning funds need to be escrowed during construction to keep the community becoming the bag holder later.
AI Must Pay Us
Second, the social costs of AI need to be borne by the companies that benefit. Some, including such luminaries as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Andrew Yang have proposed robot taxes or social welfare funds to ease the pain of transitioning to an Ai economy.
We’ve been through social upheaval caused by technology before. A hundred and fifty years ago most everyone lived and worked on farms. The Industrial Revolution emptied the fields and filled the factories. Then the Information Age emptied the factories and filled the offices. Where does everyone go next when the offices are run by AI?
The current scare is that at least 50% of the white collar workforce will be obsoleted as AI takes over clerical, management, and professional tasks. Aides and secretaries gone. Paralegals gone. Writers and actors gone. Supervisors and managers gone. Software engineers gone. Offices will empty and, just like in the Covid days, restaurants, stores and other businesses that support those offices will wither and die.
Personally, I don’t think it’s going to be quite this dire. What’s more likely is that AI will be an enhancer to make you much more productive, similar to the way a tractor makes it possible for a farmer to till far more acreage than with old Sal, the mule. New opportunities will spring up to replace the more mundane tasks that AI will handle. But it is likely to be an ugly transition until we get used to the idea that most of us still need to make a living without contributing what we contribute now.
Would you really mind some extra leisure time if you could still pay all your bills? That could happen if AI creates something like the Alaska Permanent Fund that pays residents a dividend each year from investments generated by the state’s oil and mineral wealth. Those data centers popping up all over can certainly pay property taxes, but also add utility capacity to the area, rehabilitate brownfields, and kick in something extra for the social costs of AI upheaval. Who wouldn’t welcome these new corporate citizens if their home property taxes went down and the municipality had extra funds for roads and civic services?
AI and the data centers that support it can be a win-win if we get on top of the zoning for this data center tsunami and get the cost structure right for the transition to an artificial intelligence economics. It’s our future, fellow humans. We need to be in control of it.
