Colossus 1

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2:30This is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. Lately, the canniest 15-year-olds I know are putting all of their allowance towards buying fractions of NVIDIA stock. It only goes up, they tell me, with the wisdom of people who have finally figured everything out in life. My teenage investment advisors inform me that it keeps going up because the AI companies have promised that one day soon we'll reach a kind of machine superintelligence that, among other things, justifies these vast oceans of investment. It's funny, I do actually believe AI is a very useful, certainly socially transformative technology for bad and for good.

3:10I believe that. And I also believe that we're probably in a bubble. Because a bubble would just mean that, once again, investors have gotten a little too excited about a genuinely promising new technology. The sheer fortunes being spent on AI already are so large, it's hard to find the right precedence to compare to. And what we know is that the size of the bet means we're all, to some degree, in this. Whether this pays off or crashes or lands in between, the AI bet is one of the big stories of our time. But as big as it is, it can also feel abstract. And so a reporter here wanted to go see it, visit the most prominent real-world manifestations of all this money, the data centers, the buildings powering AI, which have already begun to transform American towns and cities.

4:00She learned things that surprised me about what's happening right now, about the untested assumptions that have led us here, and about how it might look if things go wrong. The story begins in the part of America that has built the most data centers, even before the starting pistol of the AI race had been fired. Our reporter is Shruti Pinamanani. I'm going to let her take it from here. Chapter 1. The Gold in the Ground.

4:32Ashburn sits on the very northern tip of Virginia, right by the Potomac. Driving around on the main roads here, everything looks so flat. It's more lawn than trees, lots of short fences behind which are these very square, very squat, windowless buildings. So you can see that, you know, we're on Loudoun County Parkway now. And more data centers here on the left. My guide today is Buddy Reiser, shaved head, dark suit. And this county that he's driving me through in northern Virginia, Loudoun County, it has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Second place is a sleepy little town named Beijing.

5:14Everything you're seeing is data center. Data center here, data center there, data center there. This is data center alley proper. Honestly, I've read a lot about this before getting here, but the scale of just the construction is mind-bending. Like, everything is being built right now, and that's on top of a whole lot that already existed. That's correct. I mean, often when I take people on tours, they think, wow, I've heard a lot about it, but this exceeds my expectation. And what you have to remember is that this is one of five clusters here, right? There's the Sterling cluster. There's the Leesburg cluster.

5:55There's the... Everywhere you look, there's either data centers or data centers under construction. Cranes abound. This building frenzy, it has certainly gotten an adrenaline shot from AI. Some of the new unfinished buildings we were seeing were AI inference centers. But Buddy told me that construction here has been going nonstop for many years. That really, it began back when we were all first starting to store our data in the cloud. Back then, this was the late 2000s, Google had announced Google Docs. You didn't have to save documents on your hard drive anymore. Amazon had announced Amazon Web Services, meaning startups could borrow Amazon servers.

6:34They didn't have to own their own anymore. And the invention of the cloud would be a huge deal. It would change almost everything about the way we use the Internet. There was money to be made here. And Loudoun needed that money. The county was reeling from two successive crises, the dot-com crash and then the mortgage crisis. And in the wake of those disasters, But he showed up.

7:02I arrived here in 2007. And you have to remember, we were pretty desperate then, right? We were laying people off. We were raising taxes. And was it that you were losing property taxes because people were leaving because of what? Like their companies had collapsed? No, it was, you know, that whole fake mortgage bubble. 81 % of our tax revenue was coming from homes, residences. So when the housing bubble burst, you know, all of a sudden we lost about a third of our tax base. So that was how I came here. I was our first real proactive salesperson. There was a reason I'd come here to meet Buddy and have him tell me this story.

7:51The thing that he was doing back then, which is selling companies on Loudoun, inviting big business to town, This happens everywhere. Every town in America needs money. Tax revenue to fund schools, roads, fire stations. And so they invite companies to come set up. They try to negotiate good terms. How good a job they do at that. What kinds of corporations arrive. That can really define how life feels in a place afterwards. The story of how things played out in Loudoun would end up contrasting with the story of another city I'd visit later on, where these same buildings, data centers, would come to represent something very different.

8:30But for now, Loudon. Buddy and his quest quickly learned a couple helpful facts about Loudon. AOL used to be headquartered here, and during the telecom bubble of the late 90s, a lot of fiber optic cable had been laid in the ground. These are the long glass tubes that carry internet traffic using infrared light. And after the bubble burst, much of Loudoun's fiber just sat there unused. And so what was here, underground, was the data equivalent of miles and miles of pristine, mostly empty highway. This area right here, this intersection of Loudoun County Parkway and Waxpool is basically main and main for the Internet.

9:13There's more fiber in the ground here than anywhere in the world. Wow, right here? Right here, this intersection. When you think about fiber, it's about capacity and it's about latency and it's about being close to that center hub. So this land around here is some of the most expensive land you'll find. And it's because the proximity means speed. Proximity means speed. I do want to point out there's a bunch of ducks on this intersection data center alley. Yeah, it's this here. Are there ducks or geese? Geese. here on the left. So, Loudon was trying to recover from the popping of past bubbles, but those bubbles had left behind infrastructure that was actually very valuable, ready to be taken advantage of.

10:03The high-speed fiber in the ground, but also these big, empty buildings that had been built before the dot-com bubble burst. And so, Buddy presented his idea to the board. Let's find some rich tech companies to fill the buildings, and that is where we will get our tax base. I remember sweating through my suit thinking, you know, how am I trying to sell this? And one of the board members looked at me and said, Mr. Reiser, I don't understand why we need data centers if everything's going to the cloud. And I'm just like dumbfounded because, well, obviously the cloud is in the data centers. It's not really in the clouds, right?

10:41Right.

10:45It's funny, to Buddy, this is just an amusing anecdote, but I found myself thinking about it a lot here in Virginia. What we call a new technology really shapes how we understand it. The name, The Cloud, picked probably to make us feel safe, to make us feel like we're not putting our data and trust in other people's computers. The name also has this side effect of making you forget that the internet isn't a thing that's invisible in the sky. It's very physical. It's made of cables and servers that all have to be put somewhere. Buddy explained this to the board member, and then he hit the road, pitching big tech companies on Loudoun.

11:25We've never given$1 of local incentive money to data centers to bring them here. Not$1. What we did, part of our pitch, was we understand data centers. We know how to get them to market. it. We're going to make it fast. We're going to make it predictable. And that was the pitch. That's what I was out on the road selling to, you know, Amazon and Microsoft and Google and all the rest of them. The pitch worked. Every tech company under the sun would arrive. The big ones, the new ones, many you've never heard of. And as the cloud grew, invisible to most of us, people in Loudoun could see all these concrete boxes blooming across the landscape.

12:09When the cloud started to take off, you know, I really say about 2017 is when that really took off. Then we had a real big growth spurt there. Then, you know, when COVID hit and everybody started working from home and we were, you know, stuck watching TV and we were streaming videos and we were communicating and learning and working and everything through the Internet. All of a sudden, there was another growth spurt. I had no idea. Yeah. You were seeing the internet from a completely different angle than the rest of us. Yeah, and we were seeing that demand. And there's not been a single day without data center construction in Loudoun for going on two decades now.

12:50That's pretty crazy. You know, fast forward from 2007 to 2025, we've been able to lower our tax rate by 48 cents on the dollar. We had 10 straight years where we were building elementary schools, middle schools, and one high school. 10 straight years we were doing that. And that money comes from the data centers. You know, we'll get a billion dollars in local tax revenue from the data centers this year. I do need to fact check Buddy here. The county made almost a billion dollars from data centers this year. 895 million to be exact. That enormous amount of money is perhaps why, even though you do find people in Loudoun complaining about the data centers, nobody wants a new transmission line going through their backyard.

13:38the general sentiment seems tolerant. Chapter 2, Inside the Cloud. No, Vincent, you can describe what you see, but you will never, ever say the name of what you see. Michael Whitlock, general manager of the SABE Data Center in Ashburn, he's actually much friendlier than he sounds over here. That area still, it's off limits no matter what you want. That's not an issue. No, no issues. The main thing that Michael is trying to keep secret is the names of the companies that are renting server space here. I asked why those names were so secret. It was indicated to me via hand gesture that that is also a secret.

14:18Oh, it's secret. Okay, that's fine. But Michael was otherwise happy to show us how this cloud data center functions. And what I'm going to show you today... The giant block of a building is organized in layers, kind of like an onion. So we're here on our loading dock adjacent to our generator yard. The outer layer, outside the building, is all the power infrastructure. So there's this power substation pulling electricity from the grid. If you look over top of those colas, you'll see a giant substation. This is the wax pool substation. Virginia's data centers use a ton of electricity. Nearly 40 % of the state's estimated power use this year will be just for data centers.

14:56However, most of the air pollution being created by that power generation, that pollution is not actually happening in this county. It's happening elsewhere, in other parts of Virginia or other states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, because that's where the grid is pulling power from. Sunny outside. Very sunny. So here, today, the skies are blue, the air is clear, and the people of Loudoun County are not dealing with the side effects of their power needs. Inside the building, Michael shows us the next layer of the onion, the cooling layer. So we have now gone into what we call the Cray Gallery. It's computer room air handler.

15:38These are the mechanical pieces of... A long room filled with industrial air conditioning fans, each one about my height, with a maze of metal tubes snaking cold water in and hot water out. And are there usually people working in here? Or is usually this empty? It's empty until we have maintenance going on in here.

15:58Have you seen the TV show Severance? I have not. We look like we're walking through the sets of Severance. It's just like these endless halls with fluorescent lighting and every door looks like the other door. And I imagine it's easy to get lost. This is our longest hallway in the facility. I'd say this is a quarter mile. This is a nice long. I thought about what it would be like for some future archaeologist finding the remains of this building, long after we're gone, after the Internet's been shut off. What would they think this is for? I realize the place reminds me a little of photos I've seen of the insides of pyramids, a labyrinthine, enormous tomb.

16:42Do a lot more people want to see data centers these days? It's always been a hot spot, but it just makes it that much more like, Hey, what's going on? Oh, what is going on? This is very loud. You're in what we call our MPOE. It's our main point of entry. This is the next layer, where all the fiber enters the facility. And finally, we get to the most important layer of all. So we're entering a data hall, the heart of the building, the place where the computers actually live. I'm going to give you up and close personal on a place that everybody doesn't get to see, so you're special. I'm going to give you 30 seconds.

17:24I get 30 seconds to stand here amidst the tall white stacks. Walking behind one of those stacks, I see an actual server rack. A metal framed rectangle, the kind you'd glimpse in the IT closet of your office, holding the stack of servers. An unremarkable hunk of metal. But this is where the cloud lives. It's funny. I spend most of my work days living inside of a Google Doc. But before this story, I'd never thought about the back end that enabled that. Like, every time at the office, I type a single letter, say an X, into a doc, that X gets transmitted over my Wi-Fi to the router, where it jumps to my internet service provider's fiber, onto a fiber optic highway, and ultimately to a data center like this one, to a room like this one, to a server like the one I'm looking at.

18:19The data center is infrastructure. And like most infrastructure, or water lines, or sewage pipes, it's both an engineering miracle, but also so reliable as to render itself boring. It works. So we don't notice it. For years, that's what data centers were. Boring miracles that nobody, except, of course, Buddy Reiser, ever really thought much about. And then in late 2022, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, quietly released a chatbot that would upend our understanding of the Internet. ChatGPT. And almost overnight, a data center would take on a different meaning.

19:12Instead of being boring old pieces of internet infrastructure, now data centers are being used to train AI, which makes them territory in a war. An enormous, expensive, ego-driven war waged by tech billionaires.

19:30After the break, Prometheus, Stargate, Colossus.

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21:59Chapter 3. Arms Race. So when you first got assigned the cloud computing beat, what did you think? I thought that I did not know how I was going to make cloud computing interesting to the reader or to myself. And so it was sort of a, let me do this niche, boring thing for a little bit before I switch beats. And now I'm like, this is going to be my beat for a long time. Anissa Gardizi is a reporter at The Information. She'd been assigned the cloud beat in early 2023. Lucky for her, this was the exact moment when this formerly sleepy part of the tech world was beginning to explode. OpenAI had just a couple months earlier released ChatGPT and everyone was going crazy.

22:46How did they do that? This is such a breakthrough. We have to catch up. Tonight, we're taking a deep dive into the world of AI with a special focus on ChatGPT. ChatGPT, which stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. And it's fully powered through artificial intelligence. Just rolls off the tongue. Uh-huh. Joining us now to talk about... For most consumers, honestly, even for most tech reporters, ChatGPT came as a total surprise. But like most overnight successes, it had been building for years. Back in 2012, a small group of academics had trained a model that was unusually good at classifying images.

23:25It could distinguish, for instance, between different breeds of dogs. The academics trained this primitive neural network using more than a million images. But their big innovation was that they'd handled the computing load with a particular kind of chip. A graphic processing unit. A GPU. A GPU specifically from a company called NVIDIA. which most people at the time associated with video games. The academics built their little neural network using just two of these NVIDIA chips. They won a contest, and they published a paper announcing that this was possible. OpenAI spent the years between that paper and ChatGPT's release applying that insight that you could build more powerful neural networks by feeding them more training data and wiring together more and more GPUs to process it all.

24:16In 2012, the academics had used two NVIDIA chips. By 2020, OpenAI had partnered with Microsoft to connect 10 ,000 NVIDIA chips. Just a couple years later, they were reportedly up to 20 ,000 chips, which is how they were able to train ChatGPT 3.5, the chatbot that would take the internet by storm. Once AI started taking off, it became clear that to train these massive models that companies like OpenAI needed to train. They needed an enormous amount of GPUs all in the same space. The data center setup that Microsoft had built for OpenAI, it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and packed with GPUs.

24:58And that was now the exact kind of setup that everybody else wanted. And what would have happened in the earlier cloud era is that the biggest cloud providers, like Google and Amazon, would have just built those kinds of data centers and rented compute to everybody else. But now, in the AI era, these companies seemed more preoccupied with competing with each other. OpenAI developed ChatGPT on Microsoft's cloud. And so you had Amazon and Google looking around the room and figuring out how they could catch up with ChatGPT. And so the issue that they were facing was that they were buying so many NVIDIA GPUs, but they had to decide, how many are we going to rent out to our customers?

25:39and how many are we going to keep for our internal AI teams because Microsoft just one-upped us with ChatGPT. I see. So it's like they realize that's a way to almost kneecap their competitors. Like if you're Google, you might be thinking, I have GPUs, but if I save more of those GPUs for myself, for my own developers, then in a way that is like a competitive advantage. Exactly. They were very much, you know, some people would use the word hoarding, But they were definitely keeping large amounts of the NVIDIA GPUs for their AI research teams. Again, chat GPT was a huge surprise to us normal people.