What is a Data Center, and why do they not create many jobs?

Well, I happen to know a fair amount of people who work with Data Centers, so I am going to try to answer this question from interviewing them. It’s a little complicated because Data Centers are changing, especially with AI.

First, not all Data Centers are owned by a single company. Developers create Data Centers, which can hold servers for many companies and run them all at once. This is the type of Data Center that Brighton City Planning said they want here. In the simplest terms, older (more pre-AI) Data Centers look like aisles and aisles of servers (for simplicity sake, servers are computers that are different than your home computer). These aisles and aisles of servers are on racks, so they can basically stack servers from floor to ceiling. Organizing them this way makes it easier to find where a specific company’s servers are located in a Data Center (building 4, aisle 13, rack 11, 7 servers up from the bottom, for example). It also makes it easier to organize power, internet connectivity, etc… for each server. Think of this somewhat like a parking lot, with thousands of the same or very similar EVs, all plugged into charging ports right at their parking spot.

In the Data Center itself, there tend to be very few employees. Once the Data Center is built, they will hire a few people for security, and possibly keep a person or two around to make sure things are running ok. Some Data Centers might have a person or two to help with server issues.

How do the servers get into the Data Center, and who owns them?

Let’s pretend you’re opening a large business that handles a lot of phone calls, maybe an insurance company. You hire a business that helps you set up your phone system, so that when people press 1, it goes to the “questions about coverage” department and 2 goes to the “why didn’t you pay my hospital bill” department, etc…. This company will help you figure out how many servers you will need to do the work and possibly to have backups and future growth. Maybe they determine you need 20 servers. They will order the 20 servers and find a Data Center that has space to “rack” them. The servers may need to be certified by another company to make sure there is no spyware on them. They will then coordinate with that Data Center for the arrival of the servers, and often for a tech to go out to the Data Center. The employee of the Center will take the tech to the designated space where the tech will “rack and stack” them. The tech will configure the servers to allow your company to get remote access to them, so you can put your software on them to run your company’s phone system. After this time, the servers are generally very stable and can often run years without needing to be physically touched. Your company is able to access those servers from anywhere in the world, reboot them, change what is on them, fix “bugs”, etc…. If something does go wrong, you would generally send the tech you used from the company who installed them to help you, and you are likely paying that company for maintenance.

So, why didn’t you just put your servers in your own building and run your phone system from there? Well, we used to do things like that, but the answer is scale. If you have a big enough business that you now need 20 or 30 servers for just your phones (your imaginary company also has servers for other company needs), it is likely cheaper and easier for you to put them in a Data Center. You don’t have to have the space, figure out cooling, figure out complex power and internet needs, figure out what to do if the power goes out, provide security, etc….

So, what are more modern Data Centers doing? They’re evolving, and they’re starting to look a little different. Think back to the parking lot analogy with all of the relatively same EVs plugged into charging ports and sitting in their parking space. With AI, the Data Centers still have the cars, but they’re broken down into pieces. All of the steering wheels are in once space, the tires in another, but the motors are all piled very high and contain all of the AI information. Businesses connect their pieces, depending on the scale they need, to the AI and let the AI do the work.

The problem is that AI uses a lot more energy. A document from United Power stated the average non-AI Google search used 0.3 kW of energy, while the average AI data search used 2.7 kW. That is about the energy it takes to run a large burner on your electric stove for an hour. In energy terms, it’s a lot. Based on my home’s average daily electricity use over the last 4 years, for 6-8 AI searches per day, I can, on average, power my entire house comfortably.

Data Center developers are going to argue about what type of data will be held in their facility. When people want to stop data centers from coming to their towns, it is important to note that they are already all around us, everywhere, and integrated into everyday life. You are using a server in a Data Center when you:

What I hope you take away from this is how integrated Data Centers are to our everyday lives, but also how the type of data they are storing is changing from games, music, movies, and access to our health records, to more sinister things like spyware and invasive “one answer fits all “ technology that (in my opinion) causes people to lose their critical thinking skills. Data Center developers will use this “you’re already so dependent on it” thinking to open a facility anywhere at any cost. We will not have control over what kind of technology goes in it. The bulk of new Data Centers are for AI and there is a race to be first and beat out competition. This false claim of AI being inevitable is untrue and they’re losing gobs of money. OpenAI, in fact, is asking for government funds.

I also hope that you take away that there is no reason they need to be here in our community. They are NOT job creators, and this reasoning is flawed.

In future articles, we will talk about electricity, gas, water, sound, infrasound, heat, property values, etc… We will also have articles on the information we have uncovered, and what we’re still trying to find out. Thank you to the community for showing up and speaking up!