Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI

by Karen Hao

the three researchers applied for funding and put together a fourteen-day workshop, inviting architecture students from all around Santiago to reimagine what a data center could look like for Quilicura. The students designed stunning mock-ups. One group imagined making the data center’s water use more visible by storing it in large pools that residents could also enjoy as a public space. Another group proposed tossing out the brutalist designs of the typical data center in favor of a “fluid data territory” where data infrastructure coexists with wetland, mitigating its damaging impacts. The structures of the data center would double as suspended walkways, inviting Quilicura residents to walk through the wetland and admire the ecosystem. Plant nurseries and animal nesting stations would be interspersed among more traditional server rooms to rehabilitate the wetland’s biodiversity. The data center would draw polluted water from the wetland and purify it for use before returning it. The computers themselves would collect and process data about the health of the wetlands to accelerate the local environment’s restoration.