You’re as ugly as a data centre

Erin Brockovich is back, and it’s not out of nostalgia for the nineties, even though greying millennials are starting to talk about Britney Spears, Piero Angela and the Chicago Bulls in the same way people used to talk about Tolkien’s ballads about heroes of the past. The environmental activist Brockovich – later portrayed by Julia Roberts, who won an Oscar for the biopic – is back to protest against data centres, those enormous buildings needed to keep pace with the AI boom. Gigantic cloud computing factories springing up where there used to be nothing but countryside. Colossal boxes straight out of a dreary dystopia, containing thousands upon thousands of servers and fibre-optic systems – all to create that Midjourney image where we look like manga characters, or to ask ChatGPT to write a letter to a solicitor or a school essay for Year 10 (it’s said that a ChatGPT search uses ten times more energy than a Google search). These data centres contain sophisticated cooling systems – so much so that the ‘tech bros’ were thinking of building them in Greenland, in line with Trump’s expansionist plan – and consume an incredible amount of water, which is set to rile farmers and growers in the countryside, who for once might join forces with anti-billionaire Sanders supporters, environmentalists, the Luddites and those who’ve read too many Asimov novels and fear a machine uprising. Seven out of ten Americans don’t want these AI behemoths in their ‘backyard’, as they say over there – in other words, too close to home. And for many, it’s purely an aesthetic issue, just like with the wind turbines in the Umbria of the VIPs. There’s the horror of finding an eight-metre-high rectangular block on the horizon that looks like a prison, an Amazon parcel sorting centre or a self-storage beehive.

And so, in the name of good taste, various data centre builders have started calling in architectural firms to make these robot concentration camps look less repulsive. The aim is to give them a hipster makeover, to make them resemble those Silicon Valley campuses with their organic rooftop vegetable patches and table tennis tables in the conference rooms, to make them indistinguishable from any art museum or university library, to plant a few decorative saplings and a flowerbed around them. To make them blend more ‘organically’ with the surrounding area, to hide them, to apply a bit of architectural make-up. In a county in Virginia, the local council, having seen the plans for a data centre, asked for windows to be fitted – fake ones, because electronic brains prefer the dark – so that from the outside it looks like any ordinary office block, whilst inside it resembles the set of a science-fiction film. Some builders, for an extra charge, even suggest cladding them in aged bricks, so they immediately look like a warehouse converted into a start-up in Brooklyn’s harbour area. After all, this is the land of Hollywood, of gilded plastic decorations in the East Wing, of fake Venices in Nevada – Palladian on the outside, a row of computers and blue lights on the inside, a frigid, intensive server farm. Because appearance matters too.