Hyperscalers

Not your typical data center

Data centers have been around for decades. Data centers provide the infrastructure to conduct credit card transactions, stream movies and TV, host cloud storage, and enable plenty of other everyday activities we’re all familiar with. 

The data centers that have been causing so much controversy lately are different. These data centers, termed hyperscalers, deliver cloud storage and artificial intelligence computing at enormous campuses. 

The rush to develop these projects has been largely driven by the ever-expanding artificial intelligence industry. Asking a chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude to answer your question requires a significant amount of electricity, and generating images and videos even more so. According to MIT, generating a simple five-second video using AI could use 3.4 million joules of electricity. That’s comparable to riding an e-bike for 38 minutes or running a microwave for over an hour. And simply training these AI models requires immense amounts of computing power and energy.