The impression I get from conversations with non-technical people is that they associate data centers with AI and all the associated controversies and negative externalities that come with that. They do not realize that there are non-AI uses for data centers. I wonder if it’s only a matter of time before people are openly trying to torch data centers.
To be fair, 99.9999% of all new datacenter projects are explicitly for AI and only for AI. Only AI projects want this much rack space. All the big tech companies combined (except their cloud computing arms) could fit together in just one of these AI datacenters.
Since you just submitted a statistic without any evidence substantiating it, I will leave this here for future readers: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
It looks like much more like 50% of new datacenter capacity is for AI workloads.