Data Centers

Doesn't everyone love a data center?

There are over 5,381 data centers in the United States, which is more than the rest of the planet. And the state with the most data centers is Virginia. Oddly enough, my voice dictation wrote “data sinners” instead of “data centers.” That's not far off.

Data centers pollute and are bad for the environment. They drain water resources. They raise energy costs for the average consumer. They bring noise pollution. They occupy vast amounts of land. A single hyperscale data center can consume as much electricity as 100,000 homes. And city governments love them because they bring in revenue. What they don't bring are a large number of jobs.

In Virginia, the General Assembly is threatened with a government shutdown over tax breaks for data centers. The state offers over $2 billion in tax breaks to these technological warehouses, and some senators believe that they don't need them. They don't. Even though most positive spin and gaslighting for data centers comes from right-wing think tanks like the Goldwater Institute (which is like arguing why you want a nuclear power plant in your backyard), the argument in the Virginia General Assembly isn't partisan. Democrats are in control, and they're arguing about this with themselves.

Data centers tend to be huge buildings full of servers that must remain powered and cooled at all times. You always hear about the cloud. The cloud exists in data centers. All that stuff on your phone is stored there. So in a way, each one of us bitching about data centers is contributing to the problem. If you store data, yeah. Every cartoon I draw is stored in a data center. But my food pics are deleted after I post them here. But then again, I'm sure this blog is in a data center. I bet there is a data center somewhere that still stores all of your MySpace info.

As with artificial intelligence, which comes hand-in-hand with data centers, this is a subject I'm still learning about. So I hope in the future, I can write more informative blogs about this sort of stuff without boring you too much. Feel free to educate me in the comments.

Nick Anderson: My brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague Nick Anderson sent me an email last night letting me know that I had scooped him on a concept. Both of us remembered that Trump considers himself Jesus. I just beat Nick to the punch. But there have been times in the past when he has beaten me. His roughs look very good, don't you think?

By the way, where is my Pulitzer Prize?

Creative note: despite working out with a hand weight last night, I had very little control of my stylus today, and my hand wanted to go all over the place. It took me a while to decide how I wanted to draw this, which you can see in the video.

I have been meaning to do something on data centers for a while now. It's nice to take a break from Donald Trump.

Drawn in 30 seconds:

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