A complex of data centers in Ashburn, Va. (Photo by Gerville/Getty Images via the North Dakota Monitor)
(North Dakota Monitor) – The next time you’re on a Zoom meeting or asking ChatGPT a question, picture this: The information zips instantaneously through a room of hot, humming servers, traveling hundreds, possibly thousands of miles, before it makes its way back to you in just a second or two.
It can be hard to wrap your mind around, said Vijay Gadepally, a senior scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, but large data centers are where nearly all artificial intelligence systems and computing happens today.
“Each one of these AI models has to sit on a server somewhere, and they tend to be very, very big,” he said. “So if your millions or billions of users are talking to the system simultaneously, the computing systems have to really grow and grow and grow.”
As the United States works to be a global AI superpower, it’s become a home to hundreds of data centers — buildings that store and maintain the physical equipment needed to compute information.
