Researchers Are Hunting America for Hidden Datacenters
404 Media••business
Key Points:
- Epoch AI, a non-profit research institute, is using open-source intelligence such as satellite imagery and legal documents to map and analyze the growth of datacenters across the United States, providing details on costs, power usage, and ownership through an interactive online map.
- The construction of massive datacenters is rapidly expanding, driven by AI development priorities from Silicon Valley and government initiatives, requiring significant investments in infrastructure and raising concerns about environmental impacts like water and energy consumption.
- Epoch AI’s mapping includes notable projects like Meta’s $18 billion "Prometheus" datacenter in Ohio and xAI’s Colossus 2 in Tennessee, using innovative methods such as analyzing cooling equipment visible in satellite images to estimate power consumption and compute capacity.
- Despite
