From CFACT

By David Wojick

Building new data centers has become highly controversial. This massive public debate suffers from a major confusion in that what data centers do is seldom mentioned, except that they do AI, which is also controversial.

The vague name “data centers” itself contributes to the confusion. It sounds like they just store a lot of data, and what good is that?

In reality, they should be called internet centers, because much of the internet’s essential processing occurs there. Internet processing is the primary function of data centers. You cannot logically love the internet and hate data centers as they are the same thing. A data center is a chunk of the internet in a box.

The big problem is that most people have no idea how the internet works, so here is a highly simplified look at it.

The core process is called packet switching, and it is amazing. It was originally developed as a “bomb proof” defense communication technology because message traffic takes no fixed route that can be knocked out.

To take a simple case, let’s say you email someone an Acrobat document. You might think it just travels to them like physical mail, but it is very different. First, the email and the document are broken down into small pieces called packets of data. Keep in mind that to a computer everything is just a structured bunch of ones and zeros, so it can readily be taken apart and put back together.

Then, come specialized computers called routers, which data centers are packed with. The sending computer puts out a call for available routers, which respond from many data centers. It picks one and sends it a packet. This process continues until all the packets have been sent to routers. These routers repeat this forwarding process until all the packets reach the final destination. Here the computer reassembles the email and the document so it can be viewed.

The immense value of this complex technology is that it does not require dedicated lines from sender to receiver. This routing process is also true for looking at and communicating with World Wide Web stuff that is running on a server computer somewhere. The web page you are looking at is sitting as ones and zeros on a server somewhere, sending you a picture version of itself.

Data centers are where most of the internet’s routers, switches, and servers are housed. The internet comes in big boxes. So, while you might not want a big box of internet in your neighborhood, you cannot reasonably use the internet and say data centers are a bad thing.

As for AI, it is not the first big technology to make the internet grow rapidly over the last fifty years. Personal computers and smart phones are two prior examples.

AI is extremely useful for certain internet tasks, such as searching and analyzing large numbers of documents. It saves me a lot of search time that I can then spend doing more research. AI can greatly improve the productivity of certain tedious tasks. Its growth is certain.

Mind you, the tremendous rapid growth in data centers being touted and causing great anxiety is likely a bubble of hyperbole. Like the dot-com investment bubble that burst in 2000, the projected growth is impossible. Growth will be sharply constrained by available electricity generating capacity.

But in the meantime, the public debate will no doubt continue. It would help if people understood that data centers are primarily the home of the physical internet, which needs to keep growing.

Calling data centers “internet centers” might help the policy debate.