What’s the point of data centres?

Data centres.

Look, for years we've talked about information being stored in the cloud and no one really ever asked where the cloud was.

And it turns out the cloud was a shed, a very big, noisy shed.

The cloud was a metaphor for stored somewhere else, not on my phone, not on my laptop.

out there somewhere well after years of everybody keeping their old photos favorite cat videos emails from their last job paying a dollar a month to store them in the cloud somewhere after doing this for decades the amount of information stored in the cloud is so big we're starting to notice that the cloud is actually these enormous sheds these enormous data centers and they're popping up everywhere and they're big and they use a lot of energy They use a lot of water.

They make a lot of noise.

And in turn, they're making a lot of fuss.

At the same time, at the same time that all these data centers are popping up to cope with all our storage, we've got this other thing happening.

We've got the chat GPTs and the AI.

more and more people are asking AI questions.

Well, we used to ask, you know, the internet questions.

We used to ask our PC questions.

Now we're asking these giant sheds questions.

So we've got all this information stored.

that needs to be, you know, physically stored somewhere and now we're using more and more processing power that is in a big shed somewhere.

So for two different reasons, we're seeing these data centres popping up everywhere, this data centre boom as it's being described.

But, yeah, what are they? They're places that store information and process information and, yeah, The chips in our computers used to do that.

We outsourced it to this metaphor called the cloud.

In reality, it's these enormous sheds and, yeah, a lot of people don't want those sheds in their community.