A single data center can use as much power as the city of Philadelphia. And they’re popping up everywhere. These sprawling buildings, filled with rows of computing equipment, are the factories of the A.I. economy; they power all those mundane chatbot searches, sucking up tons of energy in the process.
As the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman put it, “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time.”
For our latest issue, the reporter Stephen Witt was invited (“after what felt like two hundred phone calls”) inside a Microsoft facility, still under construction. I caught up with Witt to discuss what he saw there—and what A.I.’s massive energy consumption means for our planet.
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