Remember the days of waiting – waiting for a simple picture or document to load to your computer? We’ve come a long way since then – to where answers and interactions have become virtually instantaneous. You can thank data centers.
Kirk Cameron, Director at the Institute for Advanced Computing at Virginia Tech leads off our conversation with this reference: “There was a really funny bumper sticker I saw one time that said, ‘The Cloud’ is just someone else’s computer!”
He points out the frequency of our use of data centers, “From the home user’s perspective, anytime you pick up your phone, and you get on Instagram or you use Google, that request that you made is going to a data center. And then it’s doing some processing, it’s got some storage, and it’s sending an answer back to you.”
Ali Mehrizi-Sani is a professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He likens data centers to any other infrastructure, “Just like we have the power grid as infrastructure, we have water treatment plants as another sort of infrastructure, data centers are part of our digital infrastructure.”
So, I asked them point blank: What would happen if we stopped building data centers?
Cameron offers, “If you don’t allow these data centers to grow and have a lot of them, you’re not going to be able to service the needs of the population.”
Mehrizi-Sani draws on an infrastructure analogy, “It’s as if we say what if we stop building new houses while the population is increasing? Or what if we stop building new highways when traffic is increasing? Maybe the impact is not going to be immediate. You start seeing maybe some overcrowding, some traffic. But over years, we see that a lot of services, they become very slow. Of course, costs to the companies is going to increase because now you have increasing demand for limited amount of supply.”
To Cameron, data centers are a natural progression of technology, “If we don’t keep innovating, how do we know what our needs are in the future? We don’t, right? All we know is this: That historically, since the 1970s, when personal computers really became prevalent, we all found needs for these things and now we can’t live without them. We didn’t have the need. It wasn’t like we were running around saying ‘we need laptops’. The technology comes onboard and we find new uses for it.”
Mehrizi-Sani says it ultimately comes down to deciding what it is we want, “We, as a society, are relying on digital services more and more. A lot of government services are online. We do a lot of online shopping. We watch a lot of cat videos. And, of course, these days we use a lot of A.I. Chat GPT and the like. All of those rely on data centers. So, as we are becoming more of a digital society, our need to data centers increases. So, the fact that companies are building more and more data centers, is really a reflection of what the society wants and the direction that the society is going.”
It’s unlikely growth will slow, but Cameron says there’s always a constant when it comes to technology… change, “On the current demand, we’re fine – we’ll be fine. But when the demand increases, which it always does, it’s gonna keep going up – the demand, I mean. So, I don’t know if you ever satiate the need for more and more data centers. Unless, a technology like Starlink comes along and disrupts the whole idea. We won’t have to build data centers anymore. We’ll build something else.”
