About a decade ago, I read a blog post on Microsoft’s website about a team of engineers who sank a data center off the coast of California. The story struck me as cool and innovative. The journalist in me questioned the environmental impact of dumping data centers in the ocean. At the time, I was exploring an opportunity to write “journalism-style” stories for Microsoft. It would mark a transition into the world of corporate and institutional communications after nearly two decades as a science and technology news reporter. The chance to work with researchers and engineers who imagined things like underwater data centers and had the resources to make them real sealed the deal.
A few years later, the underwater data center team geared up for the second phase of the project, which was designed to test the commercial viability of the concept. I was asked to cover it, an assignment that started my journey into the data center industry. In addition to stories about the underwater data center deployed off the Orkney Islands in Scotland, I wrote about grid-interactive batteries that could turn data centers into a grid asset rather than a liability, an experiment to cool servers in a tank of boiling liquid that could make data centers more energy and water efficient, a project to develop hydrogen fuel cell systems powerful enough to replace diesel-powered backup generators, and an initiative to accelerate the development of low-carbon cement and steel for data center construction.
These stories reinforced a feel-good narrative of big tech using its weight and resources to convert sustainability talk into action while educating readers about the infrastructure that enables the internet, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. For much of its existence, this infrastructure was invisible. Early websites were hosted on single servers in office closets and bedroom corners that were reached through dial up modems. Standalone data centers began to appear in the 1990s and early 2000s as the dotcom bubble fueled construction of internet exchanges. In the 2010s, businesses, governments and institutions began to shift from on-premises server rooms to leasing space in colocation data centers. Then boom. COVID-19 hit. The pandemic induced lockdowns forced a shift to remote work, boosted content streaming and spurred e-commerce for everything from food to furniture, all of which accelerated growth of digital infrastructure. By the time ChatGPT was released, data centers were front-page news as the picks and shovels for a modern-day gold rush.
More than 70% of Americans say they wouldn’t want to live near a data center, according to Gallup. New York State just enacted a moratorium on new data center construction. Similar measures have been passed or are under consideration in cities and counties across the country. Opaque financial and regulatory processes behind data center development seed mistrust. Perceived and real impacts of the developments on electric utility bills and local watersheds are cited as drivers behind the pushback. So too is the noise from cooling fans, the seemingly relentless tests of diesel-powered backup generators, and endless construction. Data centers are also the physical manifestation of AI and thus bear the brunt of anti-AI sentiment. The breadth of the pushback translates to a collective desire for data centers to disappear.
For the next step in my data center journey, I started to research and write about challenges and opportunities across the digital infrastructure industry for Infrastructure Masons, a global non-profit professional association for the builders of the digital age. The gig involved interviews and conversations with industry leaders around the world. Nearly everyone discussed access to power as the most immediate concern. The lack of people with technical skills to build and operate data centers was another common refrain. So too were questions about the ability of the industry to maintain accelerated growth in the wake of ChatGPT and meet commitments to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. A fourth concern centered on the public’s increasing negative perception of data centers. We captured these trends in a report published in April 2024.
I then got looped into an adjacent initiative to address the industry’s perception challenge. Our task was to develop a framework for how data centers could be a good neighbor, to fold into the fabric of the local communities where data centers are deployed. We created a rubric to measure success across a range of economic, social and ecological factors that were benchmarked against local norms. I wrote a story that imagined how the framework could be applied, a type of speculative fiction. It features a data center developer forced to engage with the community to get a project built, which ends up revitalizing the site of an abandoned mall and preserving a patch of community coveted farmland.
In March 2025, industry leaders gathered in the foothills overlooking Silicon Valley to discuss the community engagement initiative. There, I reconnected with Sean James, a Navy submarine veteran who was the brain behind the underwater data center and several other projects I covered while working in Microsoft’s newsroom. In subsequent conversations with him, I learned to think of folding data centers into the fabric of local communities from an engineering mindset, to make them more efficient by getting rid of non-value-add components. Sink data centers underwater to reduce cooling equipment, replace diesel generators with hydrogen fuel cells to dampen noise and air pollution, innovate low-carbon building materials to meet sustainability requirements. Sean calls this disappearing the data center.
Microsoft shelved plans for underwater data centers after the second phase of the project and applied lessons learned to improve data center operations on land. In the years since, data centers have grown bigger in footprint and power capacity. They are more visible today than ever – on the news and internet if not physically in our backyards. This stage of growth is fueled by AI, a technology that is as disruptive and uncomfortable as it is exciting and potentially transformative to the way we all live. Robust debate over how AI is trained and used is necessary, healthy and expected. The people who build the infrastructure that enables AI are not in the business of making AI go away but they are driven to make data centers themselves disappear into the background, to cut them down to their essentials so that data centers are as unremarkable and overlooked as the water towers, substations and power lines that enable communities to thrive.
Additional information:
— Read Sean James’ post about disappearing the data center.
— Learn more about the underwater data center and read some of my stories for Microsoft.
— Check out Infrastructure Masons, including the annual reports and community engagement initiative.
Top image: Microsoft’s Project Natick on deployment day off the coast of the Orkney Islands, Scotland, June 1, 2018. Photo by Scott Eklund/Red Box Pictures, via Microsoft.