Data Centers: Can't Live With Em, Can't Live Without Em

Data centers are the backbone of our digital world. All the sites you visit and social media you post happen there. A boom in huge data centers to support AI is underway, and they’re taking a big toll on the environment and life for the people around them. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability and it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 0:46Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And we've got our pocket protectors and tape on the bridge of our glasses. And this is Stuff You Should Know.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Nice work. Did you just hear something?

• 1:02Josh Clark?

  No.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Oh, weird.

• 1:03Josh Clark?

  I heard you say, nice work.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05Josh Clark?

  And then stop abruptly.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Well, I stopped abruptly because I thought I heard a little digital glitch.

• 1:11Josh Clark?

  Oh, no, I didn't hear anything.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  I might be losing my mind then.

• 1:16Josh Clark?

  I, you know, I'm curious whether we end up editing this out or not. Any other podcast on the planet would edit that out without even thinking about it. But there's like a 50% chance it'll stay in with us.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, this is why we didn't get that Golden Globe nomination.

• 1:30Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  This kind of classic Stuff You Should Know unprofessionality.

• 1:34Josh Clark?

  That's exactly right. That and the Italian accent, the mispronunciations, there's a whole laundry list.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40Josh Clark?

  That's okay, Chuck. I think we're, we're golden regardless.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 1:46Josh Clark?

  So we're talking about data centers, which I had a very, very rough idea about, but actually, no, I knew that they existed essentially and that they were

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55Josh Clark?

  becoming a problem with the rise of AI.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:59Josh Clark?

  But that was about it. How about you? Are you, are you data, data center philiak?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  No, you know me, I'm not, I'm not super technology minded, so I don't know a lot about this stuff. I remember walking by our server room back in the day when we were at Ponce City Market and seeing our colleague Izzy in there, hard at work.

• 2:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  And when that door was unlocked and open, hearing the whir of the, of the servers and the cooling machines and, you know, that, that's a, on a smaller scale, that's a data center.

• 2:32Josh Clark?

  Absolutely. A hundred percent that's a data center. It was also a great place to curl up and take a nap in the middle of the day.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  The warmth of the server.

• 2:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And the whir puts you right to sleep.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  So, uh, yeah, that definitely counts as a data server. If you have like one of those, um, little home networking setups and like a closet in your house, data center.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  Technically, the PC is a data center. Anywhere you can store and access data, that's technically a data center. And you're like, well, that's stupid. Why'd you even say that? Josh did squibbling, that's quotidian. Shut up and get on with data centers. Whoa, whoa, whoa. First of all, don't use the S word. And then secondly. Yes. I, wait, what did I say? That's the Q word?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Quotidian.

• 3:19Josh Clark?

  Oh.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  No, that's KW.

• 3:21Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 3:24Josh Clark?

  So the reason that I bring that up though, Chuck, is because that technically is part of the progression of data centers.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:31Josh Clark?

  Probably goes without saying, but it's evolved along with computing and as computing's kind of gotten bigger and bigger, the need to, to store and access more data has gotten bigger. So much so Chuck, that just wrap your head around this one. In 2024, just over a year ago.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48Josh Clark?

  We used 150 zettabytes of data. That's what we consumed. And consuming is anything from making a video and uploading it to TikTok or putting a post up on Instagram. It's, um, browsing a website, it's buying a song from iTunes, it's doing web analytics, it's buying something with your American Express card. All of that is data consumption and we consumed 150 zettabytes of data in 2024.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't even know how many Big Macs that is. I know you name dropped a lot of brands. It should be like the movies where every time you even just say like buy something on your Amex, the bank account grows by like $10.

• 4:32Josh Clark?

  I agree wholeheartedly. I agree that Amex should do that. Amex? There's 20 bucks, I'll split it with you.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Wow, you just bought lunch in 1997.

• 4:43Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 4:45Josh Clark?

  So just real quick, a zettabyte Chuck is a trillion gigabytes.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 4:48Josh Clark?

  And we consumed, so we consumed 150 trillion gigabytes.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 4:52Josh Clark?

  That was 2024.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  That's worldwide, right?

• 4:55Josh Clark?

  Yes, yeah, that's worldwide. In 2010, we consumed two zettabytes.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Jeez.

• 5:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so it's growing exponentially, which means that data centers are growing exponentially. And now they're about to just blow up, like truffle up essentially from, from, you know, this kind of calm plateau that they'd reached, it's about to just go in hyperdrive.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and actively is, and we're gonna, we're gonna get to some startling statistics later on in the episode, but, Kyle helped us out with this, our writer over in the UK.

• 5:29Josh Clark?

  He did a fantastic job.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  He did a really good job, and there's gonna be some UK specific things in here, because Kyle's always keen, as they say, to throw that stuff in there.

• 5:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. Kyle likes to pepper those in.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  And he's not barred from doing so. We allow it.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  So, since Kyle, you know, is frequenter of the Wayback Machine, as are all the wonderful writers that we use, they all have the keys to the car essentially.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  He jumped in the Wayback Machine to sort of give us a little bit of a timeline on data centers and a bit on, you know, mainframes and PCs.

• 6:05Josh Clark?

  He also left all of his used tea bags in there too. I don't know if you noticed.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it's fine. You know, you can throw those back in some hot water and they do just a little bit weaker tea.

• 6:13Josh Clark?

  Well, if you put like five of them together, it's like one.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Kyle, I mean, that thing was full.

• 6:18Josh Clark?

  It really was. He drinks a lot of tea.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  He really does. So if you want to talk about the earliest data centers that you could kind of call maybe a data, a data center, they were, you know, computers, they were electronic computers. Most of this stuff that we're gonna talk about early on was military in use. And as you'll see, even the first, when we talk about the UK one that was supposedly not military, they even loaned it to the military, which was kind of interesting. But these things were built with, you know, state of the art technology at the time, which meant vacuum tubes and, you know, manual switches and plugs and things like that. And the first thing that we can really talk about as the first programmable electric digital computer was the Colossus. And as we'll see, Elon Musk has now stolen that for his own purposes, that name.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Probably because of this, I would imagine, but it was at Bletchley Park, of course, during World War II. And they were trying to, you know, crack into Hitler's messages at the time. And these things were huge. And kind of to me, the thing that stood out about Colossus, which is a neat little factoid, is that where Colossus was at Bletchley Park at Block H, it is now the National Museum of Computing.

• 7:31Josh Clark?

  I want to go to that so bad. When we do that, that UK Europe tour next year.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 7:37Josh Clark?

  We got to go to that together, okay?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Okay, are we doing that next year?

• 7:41Josh Clark?

  That's what we were talking about.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  All right.

• 7:43Josh Clark?

  We kind of already have promised it. We have to now, we're locked in the punch.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Why is my voice so high then?

• 7:49Josh Clark?

  I don't know. You practicing for the Alps?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. No, that'd be a lot of fun. I'd love to go to that.

• 7:56Josh Clark?

  So that was Colossus. Another one about the same time was the ENIAC, Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer. So that's a quality acronym.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:07Josh Clark?

  And it was the first general purpose electronic computer. And here's the thing. This is technically not data storage yet. It's data processing.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:17Josh Clark?

  But these things, Colossus, ENIAC, you walked up to them and you said, what's the trajectory of this missile if I fire it from here? And ENIAC would go beep, bop, boop, boop. And then say like, whatever a trajectory is described in.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 8:32Josh Clark?

  Or Colossus, you'd be like, what is Hilter saying here to Goebbels? And the Colossus would say, Hilter is saying that he's a big fan of Goebbels' work, but he's suspicious that the rest of the world doesn't like either of them. And that was it. After that, you'd be like, hey, what was the last answer? And they'd be like, what's an answer?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta just tell me what's going on with this Hilter business.

• 8:56Josh Clark?

  You don't remember from our Art Mysteries of the Art World? That how stuff works already go-

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Oh, did it say Hilter?

• 9:04Josh Clark?

  The title of that section was, "Did Hilter do these paintings?"

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Oh my god, that's a, that's a deep cut. I did not remember that.

• 9:10Josh Clark?

  Yes, and I think it still says that on that, um, that listicle.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  Oh, probably.

• 9:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can only hope.

• 9:17Josh Clark?

  It's gotta be Hilter forever.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  All right, so, uh, we go into mainframes at this point, and this is, uh, like the 1950s, basically, when companies, um, could actually have their own computer. It wasn't just the military. Uh, these were the old punch card computers, and they were called mainframes. It wasn't made up for this term. Uh, mainframes were originally described, uh, were describing like what you would house telecommunications equipment and maybe some other sciency stuff.

• 9:42Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Uh, but it was referencing literally the cabinets that held this technology. And it became known as just, you know, it kinda took over when the computers, uh, world started using it as computer only.

• 9:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but again, this is, um, like, you're a company, and this is where you store and process all of your data, and it's in this one room, but it's not going anywhere else. It's not for anybody else. And you have to physically be in the room to get your answer, process whatever data you're looking for. When the PC came along, and then the Macintosh came along, they took that thing and just made it very small so you could put it on all of your employees' desks. And now they had, like I was saying before, their own little data center right there. So if you said like, "Hey, what's the, um, uh, I need to know the Q4 reports," they'd say, "Go to Debbie's desk."

• 10:33Josh Clark?

  Debbie's the one who's got that on her computer. And you would go over there and say, "Debbie, what's the Q4 report?" And Debbie would give it to you, right? There was no connectivity, but you could still, like, do a lot more stuff than you could when you had a mainframe.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 10:50Josh Clark?

  Which makes mainframes feel like really outdated, but it turns out they're like totally still in use today.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, absolutely. Uh, I do wanna jump back in time a little bit because I did, I promised talk of, uh, lending the military, uh, basically your equipment. And that's what happened in 1951. There was a tea shop chain. In the UK, I don't know if it's still around, Lyons, L Y O N S. And they were the very first company in the world that used a mainframe. It was called the Leo, the L E O. And it was, you know, like what you would think. They've handled like payroll and stock management and stuff like that. But there wasn't a lot for it to do at a T shop chain, except for those couple of things. And so they calculated missile trajectories like you were talking about for the Ministry of Defense.

• 11:34Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And that actually kind of helped establish like a, I guess, a pay schedule or how people charged for data centers to come.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:45Josh Clark?

  It was, you, they, like, you would charge them for the time that they used it, or you could lease it for a month. And that really started to come around when IBM got in the game. They became like the mainframe leader in the 50s, the early 50s. I think they had a unit that you could lease for $16,000 per month. That's in 1952 money. And then as the things, as like the processors got better and smaller and faster, that price came down dramatically. And then finally, in the 60s, they released the IBM System 360, which not only got Apollo 11 to the moon and back.

• 12:26Josh Clark?

  It is a, it appears in an episode of Mad Men, apparently.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 12:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  You didn't see that, though, right?

• 12:33Josh Clark?

  No, I never did. I just saw a reference to it on the internet.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  And you knew it was the show?

• 12:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah. But they, like, you should look up pictures of it. It's like those giant burnt orange cabinets with reel to reel magnetic tape. It's just, they're, they're cool to look at, yeah.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember we've referenced the movie War Games from our childhood in the 80s a lot. And the, the Whopper from War Games was, that was, you know, at that age, to see the Whopper in action and to see Matthew, I almost said Matthew Modine, Matthew Broderick, hanging up his handheld telephone receiver onto a modem to talk to the school computer. It was mind blowing.

• 13:12Josh Clark?

  That, that, yeah, that phone in the modem made just a really big impression on me.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and a cool sound.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Beep, bop, boop, boop. Should we take a break?

• 13:23Josh Clark?

  Wait, let me talk about mainframes today, though, because I just want to give a little, I don't know if a shout out is the right term, but they are still around because they're so reliable, because they're so secure. You can make it so that there's information on those things that you, again, have to be physically present in the room to access.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 13:41Josh Clark?

  You can put all sorts of different layers of security. So if you're like Visa, or you're a healthcare company, or you're the Census Bureau, you're probably still using a mainframe because you're protecting information as tightly as you can. But those things are also super fast and can hold huge volumes of computation at once.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, or a non-Golden Globe nominated podcast.

• 14:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, we've got our own mainframe.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:09Josh Clark?

  We've got our IBM 360.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  That's right. What year was that from again, the 360?

• 14:14Josh Clark?

  64.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's the one.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  I'm just making sure we didn't have the 65, because that was notoriously buggy.

• 14:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  All right, we can take that break now, and we're gonna jump out of the Wayback Machine and venture into the modern world, right after this. Beep, bop, boop, boop.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  This mood check is brought to you by State Farm. Porque tu bienestar también merece protección. ¿Qué tal, mi gente? Honey German checking in contigo. Take a second. Literalmente, un momentico para ti. ¿How's your corazón feeling today? If it's a little tired, a little oof, you're not alone. Have you eaten algo rico? Taken a deep breath? Maybe even turned off your phone for cinco minutitos? I promise, the memes will still be there. Sometimes self-care isn't candles and meditation. It's just saying no. It's drinking a little bit of agua. It's letting yourself rest sin pena. You don't have to prove anything today. Just be, breathe. Estás haciendo lo mejor que puedes. And yes, that's enough.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  All right, so we are out of the Wayback Machine. We're making that, we're combining all those old tea bags and making some still somewhat weaker tea.

• 15:54Josh Clark?

  It really works, though.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not too bad. It's a combination of Earl Grey and chamomile, all kinds of fun stuff, but not too bad. And now we're going to talk a little bit about when things started to ramp up because it kind of happened in fits and starts. And one of the biggest, I guess, would it be a fit or a start, was the internet. Because once the internet came along, every business in the world started using it. And so, all of a sudden, you had to have a lot more data storage and bigger data centers and bigger server rooms in your companies, which was, you know, a pretty good thing at the time. After the dot com bust, there were a lot of casualties of that growth. But then things kind of, you know, the ship kind of righted itself.

• 16:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and because it was like accessible to basically every business now, like you didn't have to buy a mainframe. You could, you could lease space on someone else's mainframe, like you're the Ministry of Defense or something all of a sudden. So that led to this huge proliferation. That gave the, the foundation for web commerce, e-commerce. That's what they, they used to call it. That's an old timey term now. But it created the ability for e-commerce to start and flourish. So it, this data centers scaling up to meet the needs of the internet and then to kind of give people all sorts of new space and room to come up with new stuff. That's where the digital economy came from right there.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, all of a sudden you could hop on Webvan and order a sack of groceries.

• 17:24Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm. I have a friend who was all in about that.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Webvan?

• 17:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I had a friend who was pretty heavily invested in Webvan.

• 17:36Josh Clark?

  It's, but clearly it was ahead of its time. I mean, it's, uh, let's see, it's a Postmates and...

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot, several of them now that have succeeded.

• 17:46Josh Clark?

  We'll name them, we'll get 10 bucks each.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Well.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  Well, you just got 10 for Postmates and you gotta split that with me, you know?

• 17:53Josh Clark?

  I will.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  All right.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Cloud computing was the next big jump when cloud computing came around in the early 2000s. Or do they call that the early aughts?

• 18:03Josh Clark?

  I do.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Okay. I thought I'd heard that come from your mouth, but that is when, you know, that was the real game changer because things were still, I mean, when cloud computing came along, people thought of it.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  If they didn't look too hard into it, they thought it was just, you know, floating up in the ether somewhere.

• 18:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  It's, it's still being stored on stuff. It's just not being stored locally. So all of a sudden, things were just going somewhere else for someone else to worry about all that storage. And more importantly, they could, they could link everything together and store a lot of stuff from a bunch of different people.

• 18:38Josh Clark?

  Right. So now you have data centers, not just available to somebody like a huge bank or something like that, or the government initially, then a bank, yeah, or a tea shop. And then to e-commerce businesses now, it's available to you and me. So it's really hard to remember back because the world has changed so much. But Chuck, like 2008, 2009, they were giving us like VPN little things that, that, that like, you could go home and work and like you would, it would never work. I'd never understood how to make it work.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:13Josh Clark?

  But that was like the very beginning of how you could take your work home with you and work from home and do things remotely like we can now, like it's nothing. But this led to the rise of businesses like, like Dropbox, right? So Dropbox goes to Amazon Web Services and say, hey, we want to buy a bunch of your cloud, right? Which means that they're going to use a bunch of like different servers and different data centers all over the place. And then Dropbox turns around to you and says, hey, if you give me $19.95 a month, you can have one terabyte of data.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:47Josh Clark?

  You can consume one terabyte of data, right? And then hopefully you don't use all of that. So they don't have to pay Amazon Web Services for stuff they didn't use. But you're paying that $19.95 a month rather, whether you use that whole terabyte or not. It's a pretty smart business model. Would not exist at all if the cloud didn't, didn't exist.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny as you were talking about 2008 and how quaint that is now. That's the year we started the show.

• 20:14Josh Clark?

  I know, I know.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Isn't that crazy to think about?

• 20:16Josh Clark?

  It really is, but imagine like, like, working from home at that time. It was just, you didn't. You couldn't.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  It was kind of great. You went home and you homed.

• 20:26Josh Clark?

  That's exactly right. That was a big difference. Yeah, I remember.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  But these data centers have now come together in such a big way now that they, the largest ones are called hyperscale. And they host more than 5,000 servers, like servers, not, not individual person's data. It's like, it's incredible how big is, how big they've gotten. Google's, and we'll go over some of the kind of square footage and then later talk about the elephant in the room, which is energy and water usage. But Google's first data center was built in 2006, just about two years before Stuff You Should Know launched. And this was in Oregon. And they are still expanding that thing beyond 1.3 million square feet. Meanwhile, in China, they're like, hold my tea, I guess.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Because China Telecom has a 10.7 million square foot data center in Inner Mongolia.

• 21:19Josh Clark?

  It's 250 acres.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  That is a warehouse full of whirring servers heating up and being cooled.

• 21:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, which is a big problem for any data center, it turns out. But the, the whole, the whole expansion, this jump starting in 2017, thanks to cloud computing. Because again, cloud computing just means all your stuff isn't on one server and one data center. It's broken up into pieces and spread all over the place. That's the cloud. That's basically it. Even though it's way more advanced and intricate than that, that's like, all you really need to know for the purposes of this episode, right? It, it led to a huge jump, a huge need in data centers. And it also expanded all the stuff we can do now. And COVID actually gave it another bump.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:06Josh Clark?

  Made building a data center a very economically attractive thing to do if you had the money. Because remote working finally, finally established itself as like, no, we're doing this. Stop calling us back to the office.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is what they're doing now.

• 22:23Josh Clark?

  I know, I know. I hope it doesn't work because I remember when when all of that started and everybody was so nervous, like, management was all so nervous that people were just gonna totally, like, mess around and everything. It just, it didn't happen. I don't know anybody who's even been, like, gotten a talking to, let alone been fired for for just messing around at home. As a matter of fact, like you were saying, it just makes you work more.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, do you know how many times in our old offices I would see Jonathan Strickland just wandering aimlessly through the office chatting with people?

• 22:55Josh Clark?

  Yes, I do, because he would chat with me a lot.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  He did. He did that in in front of God and everybody, as they say, right there in the office. So I can't imagine what happened with him at home.

• 23:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like it was a sorority mixer or something.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Uh, we love Strickland. He's still around everyone, by the way. He uh, he retired from tech stuff, but he's still with the company, which is great.

• 23:16Josh Clark?

  We love Strickland.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Uh, all right. So now we're on to AI data centers. And that was the, I mean, to call it a game changer is is seems quaint compared to the rise of cloud computing and everything, because it is off to the races in a way that seemingly cannot be stopped. The genie has left the bottle, as they say. Uh, starting in 2022, when ChatGPT was released by OpenAI, all of a sudden, the need for these data centers became exponentially greater in size and the speed at which they need these things built. Because AI requires a ton of computing power to operate.

• 23:58Josh Clark?

  So much so that they don't even use the standard, um, what's called the compute machines. So compute is like all of the processing power, the networking, all of that stuff. And traditionally with a computer that's done on a CPU, right? That's how that's how all of this gets done, right? Everything else is infrastructure. The CPU is doing all of the work. Those are so like, they still work. They like, most data centers are running on CPUs. For AI, just not fast enough. They use GPUs, graphic processing units, which are associated with video games for most people. Right? You need a good graphics card to run your video game, I guess.

• 24:40Josh Clark?

  But, but they, the reason that for AI data centers that they use GPUs is because they're really good at parallel processing. They can run a bunch of different operations at once. So you're like, cool, you just throw a GPU in the data center and you can run an AI. No, you need hundreds of thousands of these things strung together. And instead of like a CPU running like a couple of servers or something like that at a data center. All of them are strung together to form one giant supercomputer that the AI operates on.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, like ChatGPT itself was trained on 20,000 of these GPUs. A GPU, you know, the sort of the biggest name in the game. There's a couple, but the biggest one obviously is the Nvidia. But the Nvidia H100, that is the standard right now. If you look this thing up, it, it fits in your hand. It's not like some gigantic thing. 20,000 of them linked together, or 100,000 of them linked together. Who knows how many, you know, hundreds of thousands are eventually going to be linked together to end the world.

• 25:46Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  That's where all the power comes from, like you were saying. But it's, you know, it's just a, a little rectangular handheld thing. That's like, oh, that looks like something that maybe came out of a computer. And Nvidia is, what did their stock jumped over a couple of years? Like 900% over 2023 and 2024, something like that?

• 26:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, 900% increase.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we'll talk about why all of this is super scary and dangerous because it really is.

• 26:18Josh Clark?

  Well, yeah, if you want a really good explanation of this about, and like you said, how many GPUs you string together before we end the world. Nate Sures and Eliezer Yudkowsky in that book I keep referencing that I think everybody should read. If anyone builds it, everyone dies about the current state of AI. They talk about this in depth, but in a really understandable way. It's really fascinating. But that's essentially one of the things they say is like, we keep stringing together tens and tens of thousands more GPUs. That just makes this supercomputer smarter and smarter and more capable. And eventually, what's gonna happen? We're gonna reach some point potentially where we just put that extra last GPU in there.

• 27:01Josh Clark?

  And all of a sudden, the balance is tipped and the thing becomes super intelligent.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  That's right. Also, a time for me, because you're always too shy to, to plug the end of the world with Josh Clark. Your fantastic limited series of which AI is one of the central focuses or one of, was it eight things?

• 27:19Josh Clark?

  10. Well, there was 10 episodes.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  10 episodes, right.

• 27:22Josh Clark?

  Thanks, baby.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Well, but one of the episodes was just like you talking about Jamie Buffett records and.

• 27:27Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  He had to lighten the mood.

• 27:30Josh Clark?

  Yep.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Should we take a break or should we keep going for a minute? Let's keep going for a minute.

• 27:36Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Because you talked about investment and, you know, if you have the money to open one of these things. And that's what these tech companies are doing, like to, perhaps their great peril at some point. We'll see. Microsoft has invested $88 billion in data centers just in 2025. Amazon has pledged over the next 15 years, $150 billion. And Google and Meta together are about, you know, not working together, but they are expected to spend about $750 billion just on equipment over the next two years. And Stanley Morgan says.

• 28:11Josh Clark?

  Morgan Stanley.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Did I say Stanley Morgan? I think we should leave that in there.

• 28:15Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Stanley says, hey, you know, guys.

• 28:19Josh Clark?

  Maybe you meant like Stanley comma Morgan.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, Stanley comma Morgan. Over five years between 2025 and 2030, Morgan Stanley says about $3 trillion is going to be spent just on the data centers. About, I mean, half of which is the hardware and half of which is just building these things.

• 28:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah, just in what the next four years?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:44Josh Clark?

  So think about it, if you're Nvidia and you're the industry leader for GPUs and everybody's like, we're going to spend $1.5 trillion on this, on the infrastructure and the GPUs. You're looking pretty good down the road.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And you know, they're doing this because there's a demand right now for use at least, because things like OpenAI and other AI creators are using them like crazy. But these companies are also using them for their own AI research.

• 29:12Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah. So like XAI has that Colossus machine that you were talking about earlier, which is 200,000 GPUs strung together. I'm not sure if it's fully online yet.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  In Memphis, Tennessee.

• 29:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and it's just for that. It's they're not doing any, they're not calculating missile trajectories for the Ministry of Defense or anything like that. Like, it's just for that AI. And yeah, I think Meta is doing the same thing. OpenAI, I don't think is building their own because they're so in cahoots with Microsoft. I think they run their stuff on Microsoft's data centers, but yeah, if you have AI essentially right now, which means like God and everybody, you probably have your own data center dedicated to it.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, and this isn't some, some moral stand I'm taking by saying that I have never used AI. And trust me, I know that every part of my life is now touched by AI, so I am inadvertently using it.

• 30:11Josh Clark?

  Touched by an AI.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  That's right. But I've never, I've never used like, you know, chatbots or, or large language models or anything like that, just mainly because I'm just, I'm fine. Doing things like they are for now and not in a, in a Luddite sort of way.

• 30:29Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  I just, uh, everything's going along great for me and my job and how I live my life. So I just, I don't have a need for it.

• 30:35Josh Clark?

  I do the same thing and I think also both of us are like, if somebody else wants to do it the other way, that's fine. Like, we're certainly not gonna criticize them or be curmudgeonly about it, or say that, you know, that's stupid.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Right, but as you'll see, you know, and again, this isn't, um, yucking someone's yum, but everyone should know what they're a part of and that's part of what the episode is about.

• 30:58Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  You know?

• 31:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah, no, I totally do. Uh, before we take a break, I think, uh, it's, it's a small kind of side issue, but it's worth pointing out that it sucks. Um, because these Nvidia chips are so in demand from these massive companies, it has driven the price for just the average Nvidia graphics card sky high. So if you're a gamer and you're like trying to improve your system, like you pay way more than you used to for the same graphics card that you could have bought for like a quarter of the price, you know, a couple of years ago.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I wasn't even looking like, I, I didn't even know that you could just buy, this is how little I know about all this before this was like, could you just buy a Nvidia GPU? But I was just researching the size and like, what do these things look like? And it, you know, it's, one was on eBay for $20,000 and I was like, oh my God, I didn't, I didn't know that was the deal.

• 31:55Josh Clark?

  Is that right?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I don't know if that's accurate. I don't, I don't know anything about it, so I could easily be corrected on all this, but, uh, that's what the internet told me.

• 32:04Josh Clark?

  Okay, well, the internet never lies.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Oh, one thing before we break real quick, cause we did promise a little UK specific stuff and I don't wanna short shrift our Brit listeners or Kyle. The UK is right now like the third largest nation for data centers. The US is first, I think Germany is second. And they signed what was called the tech prosperity deal with the giants, the tech giants of the United States. And right now, Microsoft has announced a $30 billion investment in UK data centers. And I think like 100 new AI data centers are planned in the UK at this point, moving forward?

• 32:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and I saw there's at least one in Wales that's being smartly done. They like took an old radiator factory plant campus and they're revitalizing that as a AI data center. So it does sound like I get why the UK is doing it, but there's a lot of people in the UK and elsewhere who are like, these are not, this is not a good investment for local governments or even national governments. There's a big problem with all this. Like, there is a AI boom going on. Data centers are just one part of it. Like, people are throwing money at AI like it's 1999. And a lot of people are like, there's another, it's not a dot com bubble this time, but it's an AI bubble.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:25Josh Clark?

  One of the reasons why some people are pointing to it as an AI bubble is that there's not, it's just not clear how much money is going to be made from AI and when that's going to start.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:39Josh Clark?

  I think the Financial Times called OpenAI a money pit with a website on top.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, not great.

• 33:45Josh Clark?

  No, because people are just pumping money into this stuff, but they're not getting, they're not seeing results from it, not yet. It's not necessarily a bad bet that AI is going to completely revolutionize the world and like revolutionize economies and going to make some people a lot of money. But there's just no clear path to it right now, which makes some people nervous.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's about 5%, just 5% of pilot AI programs right now in business secure returns on their investments, you know, like they make the money.

• 34:19Josh Clark?

  But Stanley Morgan is predicting revenues of a trillion dollars by 2028.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  That's what they're saying. I mean, we'll see. Nvidia, I mean, Kyle's also keen to point out that the, there's sort of a circular economy within all this going on that's a little bit like troubling maybe because Nvidia is investing in OpenAI, but that depends on their purchase of those Nvidia chips. So, you know, everyone from You know, just people who are smarter than us as far as this stuff goes are warning people right down to the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, are flashing the warning signs, saying like, this could be, you know, it could make a trillion dollars by 2028, or it could like wreck the global economy.

• 35:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we have no idea. Although I have seen people argue against it that say like, this is nothing like, yeah, a lot of these AI companies are probably overinflated, but it's nothing like it was with like the 2008 meltdown or the dot com bubble. Like, this is, we're a lot, we're a lot more seasoned or investors are a lot more seasoned than they were before. The problem is, one of the problems is that the financing is expected to come in large part from private credit, which is essentially an investment vehicle for investors to go lend money to say like companies that want to build data centers, right?

• 35:49Josh Clark?

  And this is largely unregulated, it's very shadowy. We don't know how many, like how much debt exists in the world on private credit because they don't have to report this stuff. And you know, as we learned from the 2008 meltdown, when there's like a massive speculation among finances that involves debt, that's, that can go really bad.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. And then speaking of going bad, I guess we're at the sort of environmental piece of this whole thing. And this is what I was talking about when I said that, you know, people should just be aware of what they're taking part in. And again, this is not to shame anybody who uses AI for their job or just to make funny fake videos. But, but you know, everyone is sort of tied together to make this what it is, who's using that stuff. And, and I get if someone says like, hey, if I quit this thing, it's not going to make any difference. But that's sort of the- The age old, like, you know, if I don't recycle my tin can, my aluminum can, tin cans, my aluminum cans, then it's not gonna make that big of a difference. But the idea of everyone getting together to do something for the common good,

• 36:58Speaker 02

  that's where change happens.

• 37:00Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Or where negative change happens. So as far as AI data centers go, the main, you know, aside from just, you know, the land use and everything else and the hardship on the local economies and towns in certain ways that we're gonna get to, it's really just a succubus of electricity and water usage.

• 37:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Succubus is not the right word.

• 37:27Josh Clark?

  No, but it makes sense. It's like a bunker down.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I say succubus to mean just like a bottomless pit. But I know that's not what it means, by the way.

• 37:36Josh Clark?

  A giant sucking thing, right?

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:39Josh Clark?

  And it is, it's sucking tons of electricity and water up. Like, some of these AI data plants use the same amount of electricity as a town of 50,000.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:49Josh Clark?

  And about the same amount of water as a town of 50,000 people. This is a data center we're talking about. And it's not even necessarily an AI data center, just any hyperscale data center. It uses a ton of electricity and water. Reason it uses water is because all of these processors, the CPUs that are doing all this work and just all of the networking that's going on with it's generating heat. And computing happens faster when it's cooler. So to keep the place cool, they use evaporative cooling where they funnel waste heat air through wet pads, essentially. Like, they just buy old mattresses and dose them with water.

• 38:31Josh Clark?

  And then they run the heat through there and it, through evaporative cooling, it cools it off. It's, it uses a little less electricity than air cooling, but it uses water, a lot of water.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I assume most people know this, but like, your laptop has a tiny fan in it. Like, every computer in the world has a little fan in it that cools it down. So when you've got all this stuff together, you know, it's gonna generate tons and tons of heat. That was the whirring of the server room that you used to sleep in.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Those were all fans, you know, and you know, there's some other sounds coming, but mostly it was those fans trying to cool everything down. We got a lot of stats here that are pretty eye popping, but there are 11, roughly 11,000 data centers around the world. Most of these are not AI, obviously, but they're the most, you know, robust sort of users of the energy, but they use between 1 and 1.5%, which it doesn't sound like a lot, but of the entire world's electricity usage.

• 39:31Josh Clark?

  I know.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  On planet Earth goes to data centers right now, and in certain places like Ireland, data centers use about 20% of the country's electricity.

• 39:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and if you dive into different places around like the world where data centers are, like that's collectively, right? All of them in Ireland, all of them in the world. If you kind of zoom into the towns where these things are located, there's, well, there's something called Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia, outside of DC, where there's this huge concentration of large data centers, probably the biggest concentration in the world. Those data centers use about the same amount of electricity as 60% of all the households in the state of Virginia.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's another one. By 2030, they're predicting, this is Barclay's Bank, is predicting that data center energy use in the United States would make up about 13% of the entire electricity demand of the United States. And Meta has their, they all have silly names, but their data centers called Hyperion. They're all, you know, one was, where are the, where's that list? They're all these kind of sci-fi sounding names.

• 40:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Stargate.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:47Josh Clark?

  Jupiter, Prometheus.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 40:49Josh Clark?

  I'm sure all of those nerds are like, what do you mean, silly?

• 40:52Speaker 02

  If I opened up a data center, I'd call it Old Bessie.

• 40:55Josh Clark?

  Old Bessie is, that's, I hope so bad that somebody's listening to this and they open a massive hyperscale data center named Old Bessie.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  That would be great, but Meta's Hyperion data center will consume, by the time it's finished, about five gigawatts. And if you're like, what's five gigawatts? That is about half of the peak load of all of New York City.

• 41:18Josh Clark?

  The most that it can possibly, that can possibly be demanded, right?

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, the very top load, probably, I guess, New York City on the hottest day of the year, with all the lights on at night or something.

• 41:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  And that Rockefeller tree, just, they just, summer version.

• 41:34Josh Clark?

  That puts it over the, over the edge.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 41:37Josh Clark?

  Blackout. So you can imagine that when you're using all this electricity and using all this water, if you're starting to build these massive data centers, you're looking for places that have like cheap land, cheap electricity, and because electricity is often more expensive than water, they'll go to places, they'll build them in places that are like water scarce, that have cheap electricity. On the premise that like, we're a massive multinational corporation, we can push around this little county and use up all of their water, and what are they gonna do? Nothing.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, that's literally happening. There's one right here in Georgia, in Newton County, it's a metadata center that's using 10% of the local water use. And like you said, water is a, is a resource that isn't infinite. We've talked about the dangers in the future of like, you know, perhaps the wars of the future will be fought over water. And this could get us there. I think in Phoenix, Arizona,

• 42:38Speaker 02

  you know, known for their abundant water, Meta and Microsoft use 7 million gallons of water every single day for their data centers.

• 42:46Josh Clark?

  Yep. Every day, you said?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Every day, 7 million gallons of water.

• 42:51Josh Clark?

  That's insane.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:53Josh Clark?

  And when I saw this, I was like, oh, here we go. In the UK, data centers use 10 billion liters of drinking water every year.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  L I T R E S.

• 43:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  But, you know, you mentioned some of these towns. Not only are some of the, they're like using, let's say 10% of the local water here in Newton County. In Virginia, where data center alley is, some of these places are like, some of these towns are running out of water. Like they go to turn on their water and water doesn't come out because of this.

• 43:26Josh Clark?

  Oh, plus also, like we talked about how gamers are getting, um, getting, uh, the short end of the stick. When it comes to buying graphic cards because they are in such high demand. Same thing happens with electricity. So in addition to this data center coming to town and using up all your water. They're also jacking up your electricity prices because there's only so much that your local electric, electrical company can produce. So because of supply and demand, your price is going to rise. And I guess around, um, data center alley in Northern Virginia. Electricity prices have increased 267% since 2020. And that also is affecting, um, Maryland, which is getting little to no benefit from data center alley.

• 44:09Josh Clark?

  And is just helping pay the price for it. This is subsidization of these data centers. Like they are subsidized in just about every single way you can imagine.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, and if you say like, oh, well, sure, but they create jobs, right? So that's great for the local economy. Kyle gives an example here of, uh, Northumberland, England. There's a 10 billion pound data center there. Uh, or I guess it's, it's coming. And you think, oh, great, that's, that's going to employ probably like 5,000 people, right? It's going to employ 400 people with full-time jobs.

• 44:44Josh Clark?

  Yeah, a $10 billion or 10 billion pound data center, 400 jobs. Because these things are so efficient and everything is just so advanced. They don't really need that many people to keep an eye on it, right? Plus also, the money from that data center, they're not going to spread it around the UK. It's going to flow right back to the US to the parent company.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, for sure. And, you know, we also didn't point out that a lot of these, these energy grids like are literally gonna buckle under pressure at some point. Like, they're not built for this.

• 45:19Josh Clark?

  Yes. And we're not. So I know it sounds like we're just like, and this, and that. How terrible are data centers? Like, they're incredibly important and they support an amazing array of really great stuff, right? And they are the foundation that the next expansion of the digital economy and the world culture are going to grow on. Like, they're incredibly important, but they have a lot of problems with them that need to be addressed. They're not being addressed because every government from like the local city council up to the leaders of the free world are just giving these people whatever they want.

• 46:02Josh Clark?

  That's what's going on now. There's no checks going on at all right now. That's the problem.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's because the flow of money is so great at this point to a certain segment of the population only. They're protecting their own investment, you know? They're watching their own backsides.

• 46:23Josh Clark?

  That's definitely, I would say, 99% of it. But I think there's also, Chuck, a little factor of like gee whiz. Like, these titans of the AI industry are good at like razzle-dazzling elected officials into doing whatever they want by, I think, making them feel included in this new frontier, essentially. I think there's a certain element of that.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  I think you're probably right. It's, hey, maybe it'll all work out great.

• 46:52Josh Clark?

  Sure, it probably will. It usually does. Astoundingly, it usually does work out.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Well, true, as far as the world hasn't ended.

• 47:01Josh Clark?

  That's exactly what I mean.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So I think that's it. We said, yeah, like, four or five times in succession. I think we accidentally triggered listener man.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  That's right. This relates to our History of the BBC episode, and this is from Erica. And Erica says, hey, guys, I really loved the episode. It left me reflecting on how I've come to understand the country through both the content the BBC produces and the people's reactions to the BBC. But more recently, my work as an academic has enabled me to be involved in creating programs for the BBC across TV, radio, and online, because there's one awesome fact about the BBC that wasn't included. For over 50 years, the BBC has partnered with the Open University, OU, which specializes in accessible and distance education. The partnership started in the 1970s to provide learning at scale, including facilitating university-level lectures at night on public television.

• 47:54Josh Clark?

  Neat.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Today, the partnership facilitates access to academic consultants to co-produce high-quality, informed content across platforms, including some of the David Attenborough nature stuff.

• 48:06Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Additionally, the Open University creates supplementary materials to enable people to continue their learning journey and explore topics in more detail. So whether viewers or listeners realize it or not, this partnership enables the public to benefit from specialist knowledge in accessible ways. And that is from Erica from the Open University, who is a professor of medical anthropology.

• 48:30Josh Clark?

  Oh, wow. That's an awesome... Erica, you got to send us some topic ideas, too.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Totally. Right up your alley.

• 48:37Josh Clark?

  And congratulations. That's pretty neat, making stuff in conjunction with the BBC. That's got to be a neat, high-water mark, you know?

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 48:44Josh Clark?

  And I think, Chuck, I'm curious to see if we go look at our account, if we'll see a little line item from Open University and one from BBC.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Well, what would be, like, seven pounds or something? I don't know the exchange rate right now.

• 48:58Josh Clark?

  That sounds about right.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  All right.

• 49:00Josh Clark?

  Great. Well, thanks again, Erica. And please do send us some medical anthropology ideas, because that just sounds like it'll knock our socks off. And if you want to be like Erica and try to knock our socks off, good luck. You can send it off to us at [email protected].

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, MyHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 49:35Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.