IT was once sprawling fields, but now a 1,200-acre stretch of fertile farmland is home to a single gigantic AI data centre.
The former cornfields outside New Carlisle, Indiana, have been transformed by Amazon’s latest megabucks tech investment.
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Inside seven massive buildings are hundreds of thousands of specialised computer chips and miles of fibre optic cable, connecting every chip and computer to create a giant machine ready for artificial intelligence.
And by the time the site is finished, it will be home to 30 gigantic warehouses, all for AI start-up Anthropic.
With Amazon investment, it hopes to build an AI machine that matches the power of the human brain.
And the company claims it will be “the world’s largest AI compute cluster”.
The beast, spanning the entire plot, will use 2.2gigawatts of electricity and millions of gallons of water to keep the chips from overheating.
To put that into perspective, it is estimated that a single request to ChatGPT requires the equivalent of a small bottle of water to keep the chips cool.
And this is just the beginning of the AI industrial revolution, which is leaving the UK scratching around in the USA’s and China’s dust.
AI is the next industrial revolution and likely to be bigger than the last one. But the UK is playing catch-up
AI expert Tom Edwards
The global data centre market is set to be worth $517billion by 2030, according to Barclays Research.
But are we in danger of missing the boat?
AI expert Tom Edwards told The Sun: “AI is the next industrial revolution and is likely to be bigger than the last one.
“The biggest problem the UK has in getting involved is the energy infrastructure.
“We’re playing catch- up to the US because we’re switching off North Sea oil and gas.
“We should be building more data centres, but we’d have to build the energy infrastructure to support them, which is a huge challenge in itself.
“These centres require so much energy because they are running thousands of computations in parallel to create AI and that needs a huge amount of energy.
“It’s much more energy-intensive than using a traditional computer.
“The UK has some of the best minds coming out of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to computing, but we’re woefully behind China and the US as it stands.
“Without these data centres, we’re just going to keep falling behind.
“Just to get up to speed with China and the US, we would need to do a huge amount of work, and we aren’t doing that fast enough.”
As it stands, the UK government is keen to support AI development, and has plans for a 176-hectare site in Scunthorpe, Lincs, and one in Watford that would be the size of 17 football pitches.
But neither have yet been given a green light, and would require billions of pounds in investment to build.
Number Ten has vowed to use AI to turbo-charge its Plan For Change.
Technology Secretary Peter Kyle insisted the UK was just in the “foothills” of the AI revolution and that investing in the new technology would inject billions of pounds into the economy.
He told The Sun: “Data centres are the lifeblood of the AI revolution and we’re determined that the UK will seize this incredible opportunity.
“This government is boosting our AI capability, bringing investment to former industrial heartlands for this new Industrial Revolution.
“With more than £6billion of private investment into data centres committed in the last year, we are cementing Britain’s place as a global AI leader.”
Back in America, Amazon’s Project Rainer — the site in Indiana — is so large it can only be fully viewed from above.
‘I can’t live in my home’
And the building work does not stop here.
There are plans for facilities in Mississippi and potentially North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
It’s a bid from Jeff Bezos’s company to become a heavyweight in the AI sphere which, until now, has been dominated by Facebook’s parent company Meta and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
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Not to be left out, OpenAI is building a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.
These new sites are miles bigger than the data centres built before the AI boom in 2022 sparked by ChatGPT.
And the huge change does not only create work for computer geniuses.
AI guru Tom added: “These sites bring loads of construction jobs.”
For the Indiana site, Amazon has four different construction crews working simultaneously.
The New York Times was told by Bill Schalliol, a community economic development official, that there are 4,000 workers on the plant each day.
“I don’t know if they’re competing for cash or steak dinner, but it’s crazy how much they’re getting up,” he said.
“Steel starts to go up here, the next day it’s going up over there.”
Nearby hotels have been filled with the workers, and there has been such a rise in traffic accidents and congestion that Amazon agreed to pay £90,000 to cover overtime for traffic enforcement.
They also threw in an additional £5.5million for local road improvements.
But the investment and jobs are not sitting well with all the locals.
In order to bury the fibre optic cables to connect the warehouses, and install other buried infrastructure, Amazon had to pump water out of the wet ground nearby.
Wildlife depends on those wetlands
Dan Caruso, a retired mail carrier from New Carlisle
According to one permit, the company pumped 2.2million gallons of water per hour for 730 days.
The process, known as dewatering, is now being investigated as locals report wells drying up.
“You can see the mountain of dirt they are ready to shove on those wetlands,” Dan Caruso, a retired mail carrier from New Carlisle, told The New York Times.
“Wildlife depends on those wetlands.”
It’s not the first time a data centre has been investigated for causing environmental damage.
One built in the US state of Georgia for Meta has faced allegations it is making the area uninhabitable due to contaminated water.
Beverly Morris told The BBC: “I can’t live in my home with half of my home functioning and no water.”
Meta denied being to blame for Beverly’s private well drying up, saying the water issues were not connected to their data centre.
Objections to the huge projects by locals have cost £47billion in projects delayed or blocked nationwide, according to Data Center Watch.
But with AI use booming, there are sure to be more plants built worldwide.
And it’s one revolution we will need to be part of — or risk being left behind.
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