7. MINI - How do data centers get Spiderman to your screen?

that kind of is random and we were really grasping at straws here but not really because did you know that whenever you're filming a movie you have to store that data somewhere and most of these companies that are filming or these production companies that are filming these movies they store all the footage that they get in these big cloud centers and cloud centers and all that are housed in data centers so a little explanation of how data centers work and what the heck they even are whenever think of like a movie i think the matrix for example where you see all those boxes of computers and they're just lined up against a wall with a ton of cables that's what a data center looks like from the inside and And data centers are essentially what wifi connects you to.

Whenever you're using your laptop or you're watching a movie to listen to this podcast right now, anything you do that connects you to the internet is actually, that's going through wifi, which is your path to these data centers.

Yeah, and there's a lot of negativity surrounding data centers because of artificial intelligence, right?

Yeah, the big thing with data centers and artificial intelligence, I mean, when you look on TikTok and Instagram, how people are talking about AI drinking all of our water and cutting down all of our trees, it's not AI itself doing that, obviously, but...

It's actually, that stuff can be directed to data centers somewhat with their construction in these different rural areas that's been occurring lately or how they consume a lot of water for cooling purposes.

Yeah,

so essentially the way that it works is, let's take AI out of the picture for a minute.

If you just conduct a Google search, you know, you look up democracy the pod because you love us so much.

You make that Google search, and to process and synthesize that Google search and utilize the processing software to get you to an answer that matches the keyword democracy with every result on the internet, a data center has to run that through a computer processing chip.

And that's complicated, so we're not going to get too into it.

But what you need to know is that the computer processing chip gets really hot.

Like really hot.

Really hot.

And when it gets hot, the data center doesn't want it to stay hot.

It wants the temperature to remain regulated.

And so what it does is it runs that heat through cool water and makes sure that the cool water can counteract the heat.

What happens then with the water is complicated, but essentially some of it evaporates and then the stuff that doesn't evaporate is left with wastewater, which has all these minerals and chemicals in it that is then discarded out of the data center.

So when people say that AI is a problem, they're saying it because AI does that same thing that a typical Google search would do,

just at a higher magnitude.

With a normal Google search, you're using something that's called a CPU.

And when you do an AI search, which is basically multiple Google searches at the same time, using something called a gpu these gpus or graphic processing units consume almost 10 times more power and electricity than just a normal computer search engine would so let's think a little bit about the electric cost of that global data centers in 2025 consumed more energy than all but 10 countries in the entire world And also all of that energy consumption actually contributed to as much carbon dioxide production as the entire country of Argentina.

Yeah.

And the

crazy thing about the AI processing that Charvi is talking about, which takes place in what are called hyperscale data centers, essentially just means they're really big and have these high power processing chips.

is that the processing that happens isn't just when you conduct a search in Claude or AI or Gemini, it is also constantly like 24 seven training and creating new iterations of these AI models.