The World Needs AI, But There's a Problem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpMIs6AnUW8 Bloomberg Originals Apr 22, 2025
There's no denying data centers play a critical role in society, with every text, web search and medical scan flowing through these giant buildings. Now AI has turbocharged their demand, along with the electricity that powers them. With utilities rushing to keep up and popular opposition to these behemoths growing, the latest tech revolution may be in for a rough ride.
YT Transript
Intro
When people talk about the cloud, this is kind of where we are now.
This is what they're talking about.
It's, it's not in the sky, it's, it's right here.
Anytime you, you touch an icon on your phone,
anytime you book a flight
or anytime you watch a movie at night,
you're using a data center.
There's a big division in the county about
how data centers impact their lives
and I think that we've gone overboard.
We are trying to get balance.
We know we need data centers.
This phone I'm holding in my hand right now uses data
centers, but that's not the point.
We're here in Northern Virginia
because it's the red hot center
of data center development in the entire world.
About 13% of data centers globally are here.
A full quarter of the data centers in the US are right
around us here in Northern Virginia.
If you care about the reliability
of the electric grid, climate coals like shutting down coal
plants, if you care about the development of AI, all of
that is happening right around us.
If we can't figure out how to get it right here,
how are they gonna get it right anywhere else?
Living next to a data center
We're driving to Gainesville where we're gonna meet
with a woman who lives right next
to a data center development called Village Tech Park.
It's been criticized for being basically too big, too close
to homes and there's another big development planned
on the other side of her.
So she feels just sort of besieged, kind of surrounded
by these big data centers.
Hey, I am Josh. Ari,
nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you too.
Seeing the change over the years
has just been drastic.
We knew the shopping centers were gonna
come, we didn't mind those.
But the data centers has been a complete shock
for us residents here and in the area in general
because - the train's coming. Hold for that.
And that's gotten louder.
How has it gotten louder?
Because there used to be a lot more trees lining it. Oh.
So by them taking down all the trees,
it has become a lot louder.
Would you ever consider moving?
Yes, we are looking to move.
Shortly after they started talking about the data center,
we talked about it, but unfortunately I have a child
who is in school, so we decided to stick it out
until she graduates and then relocate someplace different.
How Virginia became a global data center hotspot
So people sometimes ask,
why is Northern Virginia the data center hotspot
for the entire world?
And the reason is that in the last century,
data processing companies came here
because their customers,
government agencies in DC, were here.
So they built data processing facilities
and then as the internet developed,
there was always a good fiber network here.
There's a really strong, reliable
and relatively cheap power grid.
So data centers can hook up to electricity,
which is the juice they need.
There's fewer natural disasters here, knock on wood,
and lots of open land.
There's also been some tax break laws passed
to encourage data center development around here.
Evolution of data centers
When I got into the sector in the mid nineties
and I was selling internet access, you know,
every office in America I went into had a data center.
It was called a computer closet.
And as kind of the internet grew
and people realized I can't have this critical data,
this application in some room where there's a pipe overhead
and it could burst at any time,
then that's what gave rise
to third party data centers
where customers could rent space
and put their equipment in a purpose-built master plan type
of building that would ensure that their data,
their application would survive,
you know, a hundred percent uptime,
would always be powered,
would always be cooled.
Inside a data center
Come on in.
Wow. How tall is this?
This is about 20 feet up.
When it's all said and done, we'll be three feet
higher in the space.
Okay. Because that's where all
of our cold air is gonna be coming under the floor
into the servers.
And that's why you need so much electricity also?
Correct, yeah.
And how many square feet is this?
This is about 20 to 21,000 square feet. Wow.
So we'll have 10 data halls that are
around the same and space.
So about 20 of my apartment,
20 of my New York City apartment. Yeah, yeah.
New York City, it might be a little bit smaller.
Yeah. Yeah.
So over here is our, called our
cold aisle containment system.
This is where all the cabinets are landed and lined up.
Why do you need a cold aisle?
Why does it gotta be cold?
We have to make sure that they stay cold
while the servers
are all on inside of each rack.
We have to make sure all the output
that they're doing is staying as cold as possible
so they run efficiently.
How much electricity would this whole room consume?
Once this room is at full capacity, it can go up
to four megawatts of power.
Okay. Okay. Four megawatts. Help me out with that.
Like how many homes could that power?
Yep. So if we break it down,
one megawatt could power about three to 4,000 homes.
So this could power up to 12,000 homes. Wow.
So what are we gonna see out here?
So right now we're on the roof of this data center.
You can see it's filled with what we need to cool down
all of those CRAC units or computer room air conditioners
we saw inside of the data hall.
Okay. So these are called ACUs
or air condition compressor units.
They're kind of noisy.
Yes, they're very noisy.
That's why we kind of have the walls.
Okay. It kind of boxes in the sound.
Okay. Because we keep the residents in mind.
So we try and make sure the sound is
as buffered in as possible.
Right. They would be louder during the summertime. I
was gonna say, it's kind of cold.
We should have brought our jackets. Why?
Why are they even running right now?
So they, they're running on what's called a free cooling
mode, which means it's using the outside air
instead of - oh, just big fans. They're big fans.
Why is it so important
that you have power continually?
If you didn't have power and the data center
just shut down for a couple days,
Why is that a big deal?
Well, think about it. So in
data centers, we have healthcare,
we have transportation, we have government.
Imagine a government shutdown, how chaotic that is.
Something like that happens in a data center,
nobody can send an email, nobody can work.
Everyone loves to have the day off,
but it has such a huge impact on the neighborhood,
Virginia land use
the city, the world.
I was elected in November, 2023.
I wanted to run because I disagreed
with the direction the county was going in, particularly
with land use and with the placement of data centers.
The good thing, you know, data centers do generate revenue.
And last year when we raised the C&P tax rate,
we generated more money, you know,
for the county and for our schools.
But everything in moderation. For us on the Board
of County Supervisors, I'm saying we
have to be the traffic cop.
We cannot approve a data center any and everywhere.
These are industrial warehouses.
They shouldn't be next to
homes, schools, national parks.
They should be in areas that have enough power
to run these facilities.
The land we give to data centers is land
that other businesses aren't able to to purchase.
It's also land that, you know, we're not able to use
for housing or retail or any other developments.
Virginia is a beautiful commonwealth.
It's very scenic.
We have so much history here.
I'm afraid that that's gonna
be lost if we're just giving in
to data centers demands.
Data center opposition
When you talk with legislators today, be clear
that we're not against data centers.
We want them to be better.
Our morning started really early in a really cold,
really dark parking lot where we met a group
of data center opponents
and we all got on a bus to travel here to Richmond,
where they're lobbying their lawmakers for
what they would call
responsible data center development.
In transportation,
there are speed limits, there are safety standards,
there are noise limits.
And we're here to lobby about an industry in Virginia
that is overwhelming us and
there are no laws and standards.
We traveled with one woman, Elena Schlossberg, who's sort
of at the center of this fight,
and she's been going toe to toe
with the biggest data center developers
for about the past decade.
That's really something I,
I wanna message to the legislators
is the history books are being written right now.
And the question is, you know, what do you want
the history books to say about you?
The first year we went, nobody knew about data centers.
What's a data center? The next year we went,
suddenly people are starting to go, oh,
there's maybe something about data centers.
Oh. So the legislative review commission report finally came
out and my favorite word was unconstrained.
Unconstrained data center development is
what is risking our reliable energy, our
clean air and clean water,
the health and wellbeing of the state of Virginia.
So we're here in "data center alley."
This is "data center alley."
This is around 20 million square feet
of planned data center development.
The digital gateway, you know, that looks so beautiful,
23 million square feet of data center development.
I mean, look at the size of these buildings.
They are massive. And this is not enough by the way.
They've gotta build all the transmission,
but we don't even have the generation
to plug the transmission into.
You can see the substation, the
electric infrastructure here.
Yep. It's everywhere.
So here's another data center. Here's another data center.
More, one after the other, more transmission lines,
one after the other,
substations, one after the other.
What we see happening here in Virginia is becoming a
national grid problem.
It's magical thinking how you are going to meet this kind
of power demand never seen by mankind before.
We are at the precipice. And now is the time.
There's no more excuses
to hold the wealthiest corporations
and the world accountable for the energy they need
Global power demand and supply
for their business model.
So hyperscalers are the big tech firms like Google,
Microsoft, and Amazon.
Some of those types of companies want
to build data center campuses
that use five gigawatts of electricity.
That's a huge amount. It's as much
as entire cities like Miami
or Atlanta. Right now, Virginia,
where "data center alley" is uses about five gigawatts
of electricity for all of its data centers.
That's a lot. And enough
to power about half the homes in the state.
So the power company that has to generate
and transmit all that power, Dominion Energy,
they say that this trend is gonna continue
and that data centers in development
in its pipeline are
gonna require another 40 gigawatts. Globally,
the picture is the same, just with way bigger numbers.
There's 7,000 data centers built
or in development across the
world, with energy consumption
that's expected to top 2,900 terawatt hours
annually by 2034.
That's almost double what the entire country
of India uses each year. A terawatt, by the way,
that's a thousand gigawatts.
And a gigawatt is enough to power about 750,000 homes.
So the world doesn't currently have enough electricity
to meet all of that demand.
And that's a problem. In interviews with tech leaders,
data center developers, energy companies,
they say that there's years long wait for businesses
to connect to the electric grid.
And it's also threatening Silicon Valley's efforts
Impact of AI on data center demand
to lead the race to develop artificial intelligence.
How did AI change data centers?
The power requirement.
As soon as the power is available, it's taken.
So as soon as we can get power into a
building, AI is all over it.
AI has turbocharged data center demand.
It really happened over the last two years.
I like to think about it as, you know, pre-ChatGPT
and post-ChatGPT, right?
Pre-ChatGPT, you know, you had strong data center demand
that was being driven by technology adoption, right?
If you think about what a data center really represents,
it represents the foundation for technology adoption.
And all of a sudden, ChatGPT came in,
people saw this technology
and were like, wow, this is gonna change the world
and we need to figure out how to adopt it.
And this particular technology has a unique characteristic,
which is it can't run on CPU infrastructure, which is
what the world lives on.
It's the type of computers that are in your home
or in your office today.
It has to run on GPU infrastructure, which is kind
of a parallel processing type of architecture,
obviously most famously known by Nvidia.
And because the power factor
of these GPUs is 5x 10x, the power factor
of a regular data center CPU rack,
it's driven this incredible demand
for data center capacity.
So I do think it's going
to impact sustainability goals over the short term
and we're gonna be using a lot more fossil fuels.
I think it's kind of inevitable,
unless someone wants to put a pause button on this.
But ultimately, it feels like the utilities are committed
to a long-term renewable future.
14:09 The future of data center development
Are there parts of data centers that you see
as valuable or that you see as necessary?
Absolutely. A hundred percent. And it's not about
being anti-data.
I like data, I like technology.
But to allow it to grow
with just no constraints,
no guardrails, no accountability.
The reality is, is that the community is the ones
that are being asked to sacrifice.
And so something has to change.
My vision of the future is mixed.
We're at the beginning of a, in my view, a multi-decade,
multi-century engagement with technology.
That's the first time, certainly in human experience,
that we've had this amount of power at our fingertips
and kind of things are accelerating, right?
But I would hope that we don't lose our humanity in
that respect and that we still want to engage with the world
beyond the digital screen, beyond a digital experience,
that, you know, the real experience is
still better than, than a digital one.
And I certainly hope that we
as a species make good decisions.