DATA CENTERS? WE ALWAYS HAD THEM, THEY WERE JUST BADLY MADE
Our medical records used to sit in a storage closet, with an air conditioner running day and night, and a battery backup nobody had ever tested. And a backup you found out was broken the day you needed it.
In many cases out of all those, a few dozen met the requirements to be considered reliable. The rest were cabinets in a basement. Every town hall, every health authority, every bank, every school, every company with a management system had its own little room with servers.
Those were data centers, just badly made. Whoever says that until a few years ago we didn’t need them is wrong. We needed them and we already had them.
We didn’t see them because they were small and scattered. And scattered means 100 inefficient air conditioners instead of one done right. A modern facility spends 20 watts of cooling for every 100 of computing.
A closet spends up to 100 for every 100. It doubles everything. The ones consuming are us, watching streaming, sending messages, paying with the phone, asking things to an AI. The data center is just the most efficient way we found to do it. So whoever protests against data centers then goes home and uses the tools data centers exist for.
Concentrating saves electricity. Not the opposite. And I can tell you a virtuous case, I’m Italian, it’s Italy. On the real numbers, Italy is in good shape. 1.3% of national electricity consumption, and the most realistic projections talk about 4% in 2035. Not the energy apocalypse we keep getting told about.
Inside those sheds with filtered air, generators tested every month, two copies of every piece of data in two different places, sit the health record, the prescription that lands on your phone, the digital ID, the pre-filled tax return, the instant payment, the medical report you download instead of picking it up at a counter 10 days later. All stuff that in the last few years stopped being paper and a queue.
They go on concrete that’s already there, with the water closed in a circuit, with the heat warming houses and consumption declared every year. Built that way, they are the most useful thing we can put on the ground right now. They are the foundation of healthcare, schools, banks, research and defense.
If we go back, we don’t go back to 2005 with 2005 life. We go back to 2005 with today’s life, which is a thing that doesn’t work. It always works like this. As long as something is scattered and badly made, nobody notices. The moment you do it right and it shows, it becomes the problem.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions #MCC #DataCenters #EnergyEfficiency #DigitalInfrastructure