TechnicalAI glossary
Data centre
A building filled with thousands of servers and chips that keep the Internet running and, now, both the training and the responses of AIs. The largest of these facilities gulp down enormous amounts of electricity and cooling water, sometimes as much as an entire town.
In other words
The invisible factory behind the "cloud": every question posed to an AI triggers very physical calculations there.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- Data centres in France: the misleading figure
18 gigawatts reserved for data centres in France, three times more than in 2024. But that figure doesn't say what you think it does. The key things to know.
- The county with 250 data centres: funded schools, and a growing anger
Loudoun County, Virginia, is home to around 250 data centres. Their tax revenues have funded schools and lowered taxes, while residents' anger is growing. We examine a case that complicates both narratives.
- Data centres to pay for their grid connections: a vote of 417 to 3
A text passed almost unanimously requires large data-centre consumers to pay for the grid upgrades they cause, rather than passing them on to household bills. We analyse what it means.
- Google locks down nuclear power in Finland for its data centres
Google secures nuclear capacity in Finland to power its data centres. We analyse what this kind of deal changes, for better and for worse, for the collective energy trajectory.
- Data centers are leaving the power grid
Faced with grid connection constraints and local opposition, data centers are investing heavily in their own electricity generation. We analyse this shift and its environmental and democratic consequences.
- Pennsylvania blocks data centers without local agreement: reality keeps pushing back
The governor of Pennsylvania has signed an executive order making local approval mandatory for the siting of AI data centres. We analyse what this move reveals about the physical and political limits of the infrastructure race.