Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid

A data center, which can use as much electricity as Philadelphia, is the new American factory, creating the future and propping up the economy. "I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers," Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has said. Drive in almost any direction from almost any American city, and soon enough you'll arrive at a data center--a giant white box rising from graded earth, flanked by generators and fenced like a prison yard. Data centers for artificial intelligence are the new American factory. Packed with computing equipment, they absorb information and emit A.I. Since the launch of ChatGPT, in 2022, they have begun to multiply at an astonishing rate. "I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time," Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said. The leading independent operator of A.I. data centers in the United States is CoreWeave, which was founded eight years ago, as a casual experiment. In 2017, traders at a middling New York hedge fund decided to begin mining cryptocurrency, which they used as the entry fee for their fantasy-football league. To mine the crypto, they bought a graphics-processing unit, a powerful microchip made by the company Nvidia. The G.P.U. was marketed to video gamers, but Nvidia offered software that turned it into a low-budget supercomputer. "It was so successful, from a return-of-capital perspective, that we started scaling it," Brian Venturo, one of CoreWeave's co-founders, told me. "If you make your money back in, like, five days, you want to do that a lot." Within a year, the traders had quit the hedge-fund business and bought several thousand G.P.U.s, which they ran from Venturo's grandfather's garage, in New Jersey.