Anatomy of a data center

A data center moving into a community is like a prison setting up. Only worse. Super-high, aggressive security; ugly warehouse buildings. A prison will bring a decent quantity of jobs. Data centers bring hardly any jobs. What’s more, a data center will consume massively more water and electricity than a prison, while also causing far more noise and toxic e-waste.

Data centers are the new mines. They’re there to mine data, to mine electricity, to mine water, to mine us, to make us slaves to the data, data slaves, imprisoned and exploited by our own data. We are the new ore that the old imperialists and colonizers have come to extract from and then discard. For most data is not for the common good. It is for the sale of goods. Particularly for the sale of goods we don’t need and that are bad for the environment, for from these types of goods and services are the maximum profits made. Data centers are the hubs of surveillance-capitalist planned-obsolescence overconsumption.

Data is physical. For every byte that exists, energy, water and materials are required. Data exists on a machine in a building. A typical data center might be around 9,000 square meters (about 100,000 square feet). That’s about the size of a large supermarket. A data center tends to get classified as “hyper-scale” when it has more than 5,000 computer servers and is more than 10,000 square meters. At about 1.6 million square meters, the CITADEL, in Nevada—the driest state in the USA—is one of the largest data centers. It’s about 175 supermarkets in size. Very physical.

Inside these buildings, we mainly find what are called server racks or server cabinets. These are generally metals cabinets that are used to store the computer servers. A typical server rack is 42U (U being the measurement of 1 rack unit). The rack is about 200 cm (78.5 in) high, 48 cm (19 in) wide, and 80 cm (36 in) or 107 cm (42in) deep, making it about the size of a large family fridge freezer. In a non-AI rack, you might find about 30 servers.

Before the 2020s, each computer server might be consuming about 200 watts of electricity, with the total watts for the rack being about 5 kW or 5,000 watts. This began to change rapidly as the 2020s progressed, with some non-AI servers consuming as much as 700 watts, with the average being around 400 watts. So, an early to mid-2020s non-AI server rack with 30 servers, might be consuming about 12,000 watts and potentially as many as 21,000 watts.

AI radically changed those calculations. AI servers themselves can be four to five times taller than a traditional server, containing as many as eight graphic processor units (GPU). These are the intense processors that made NVIDIA one of the most valuable companies in the world. Each GPU can demand between 700 and 1,000 watts. Assuming an 800 watts average, an AI server could be demanding about 6,400 watts per server. Meaning each AI GPU server was using what a whole rack used to use in 2020.

You might get about eight AI servers in a rack, meaning that an AI rack could easily have a demand of 50,000 watts or more. That’s 10 times what a 2020 non-AI server rack would have demanded. That fridge freezer that’s about the same size as a server rack consumes about 200 watts, so that AI server rack is demanding 250 times or more energy than the fridge freezer. In the good old days—that’s pre-2020—a decent-sized data center might be classified as being five megawatt, which meant it had about 1,000 server racks. By the middle of the 2020s, data centers were not talking megawatts anymore. It was now gigawatts. One gigawatts is a billion watts. That’s enough electricity for about two million people. Some of super-mega data centers were demanding up to three gigawatts. There were plans for certain data centers to have their very own nuclear power plant. It’s not sustainable.