It’s time for you to start caring about data centers. Here’s why

Data centers are not new. While sometimes vitriolic discussions about the gargantuan structures have accompanied increasingly unavoidable AI conversations, data centers themselves have been around since the 1940s.

A data center, at its most basic, is a house that stores, accesses and analyzes information. They are the backbone of a lot of what we do on the internet – anything we think of as being "in the cloud" is tied somewhere to a data center, or multiple data centers. The centralization of this equipment allows for scale and efficiency.

But the data centers in today's news are not the same as those of the 20th century. They are “orders of magnitude larger than what came before,” both in terms of an individual facility size and the number being built, said Ben Green, assistant professor of information and public policy at the University of Michigan.

Rather than being used for "streaming Netflix or checking your email," Green said, these new data centers train and run generative AI models. The process of building them, who they're built for and who is impacted has sparked backlash and debate on multiple fronts.

Data centers can be thought of as AI factories where the infrastructure…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/money/