Modern data-center construction began in the nineties, with the arrival of the commercial internet. Data centers hosted websites, coördinated e-mail, processed payments, and streamed video and music.
Amazon was particularly aggressive about building data centers—so many were constructed in Loudoun County, Virginia, that the area became known as Data Center Alley. Even before the A.I. boom, data centers were profitable; in some years, Amazon’s web-services division earned more than the company’s retail operation, on a fraction of the sales.
But the arrival of Nvidia’s G.P.U.s and the onset of large-scale A.I. training transformed the data-center business. ChatGPT launched in November, 2022, and exploded in popularity. “The world goes bananas,” Venturo said.
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI to provide the data-center capacity that ChatGPT needed to function. When Microsoft couldn’t keep up with the demand, it turned to CoreWeave.
Read more | NEW YORKER