I was listening to a bit the other day on the morning news talk show here on the radiobox about the data centers being built here. A lot of complaints. Which is funny, because I see pro-Texas datacenter ads all the time on the YouTubes. Most of the complaints are misguided.
Fact of the matter here is that they are all over hereabouts and you wouldn’t notice them if you drove right past. I’ve been in many. Most are in industrial parks, running anywhere from 100-200 thousand square feet. You wouldn’t notice any noise, really, unless they were exercising their generators. Unlike what the pro datacenter commercials say, they don’t bring a hell of a lot of jobs, per se. There are construction and tradesmen jobs, of course, as they build out. Once online, there are trades jobs like electricians, data networking pros, HVAC, that sort of thing mostly done by vendors. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than a dozen souls that were local to the facility any place I’ve been.
Our governor, if he hasn’t worked it out already, is looking to have standards they have to meet regarding power and water consumption. And really, the larger ones should be remote or zoned industrial, like any manufacturing facility. The biggest and least efficient are really no different than any industrial concern. Clearly, these shouldn’t be near where people live.
But one of the questions one of the hosts asked is just who is building all these data centers?
Well, two groups mostly.
The first are those that are building purpose-built centers. These would be your Metas (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Amazon, or any other company that’s big data, like banks and insurance companies. Though, these guys mostly have them. There are, of course, the AI companies. I’ve been to more than a few carrier and manufacturer facilities, many in Richardson TX. You’d drive right past and miss them, as non-descript as they are. Only thing that tips them off is the logo on the building.
The other groups are the speculators and developers. They hoping that if they build it, the AI Genies with come with buckets of money. Blackrock comes to mind. That said, they’ve pulled out of more than a few. Rackspace is another one. These are facilities where you rent space, power, and cooling, saving you the expense of building your own place. Useful for startups. We had these sprout like daisies in the internet boom, mostly for carriers. You’d get a 10×10 colo space, rack your gear up and get into business. This would be a 10′ x 10′ space, defined usually by chain link fencing. It may or may not have racks in it. But there are troughs throughout the ceiling where the power and data circuitry run, serving the cage.
Last one I visited was in Las Colinas, TX. It was maybe 250K square feet, mostly empty. I think our Colo was about the only one on that floor. I was there to remove our gear when we discontinued our cloud product.
This second group is the troublesome lot that’s causing all this excitement.
And there’s no need for it. Many of them will never be built. Many that are will be turned into warehouse space or antique malls.
Back in the interweb heyday datacenters were popping up like daisies. Carriers and other startups were running fiber everywhere, whether it needed to to go there or not, and I was ass deep in the middle of it. Then, it all blew up. It was a bubble. Everyone wanted in. The market figured out what the internet was good for, and a lot of people were left without chairs when the music stopped.
AI is the new interweb craze. It’s the new cool toy that will revolutionize the world, a thneed! Something everyone, everyone, everyone needs! Until it isn’t. No one has figured out how to make money with it yet. All they’ve figured out how to do is set pallets of money on fire. Seen this before. The difference this time is the sheer scale of the spend. I will say that I can see the form of the AI destructor for a lot of companies. For instance, one of the software products I support scrapes data off of documents, formats it for something else to use like a database, and sends it off. You can ad a call to our branded AI (which is gemini, BTW) to figure something out that confused our software. Very cool, I seen it work. But – why would I need a package to gatekeep AI? Why would I pay us rather than simply use an API to have the AI provider do this in the first place? That way, I have no software to buy and maintain. Far as the AI provider goes, how many millions of transactions or tokens, at less than a penny, does it take to make a few thousand bucks.
Denniger is the best one to read about this. He was, like me, up to his neck in this back in the day. Like then, AI is an app that will find it’s use and when it does this all will correct. And given the state of our economy, and the fact that we kicked over a hornets nest on Israel’s behalf screwing up the energy markets, it won’t be very long.
Do I have the receipts like Denniger? No. Just the ticket stub from the movie I saw before, with the same damn plot.
BTW, I’m not an AI luddite. I use it all the time. It’s useful for some things. It’s horrible at others. But I can see where it’s going to cull the IT herd in the not to distant future. I’ve been watching techies get cut loose for the last few years. Hell, even my company has had the long knives out. Luckily for me, the corporate angel of death passed me by this time. That said, my company, and many others, are going to be left without a seat when the music stops and the market knows it.
Inspected By Pat 