The Bigger Meaning To Be Found In Meta’s Kansas City Data Center

How many reading this opinion piece were yearning for AI server data centers as the 2020s dawned, or for that matter were hoping to work at one? Tick tock, tick tock.

To say that no one contemplated what is presently proliferating is vivified by the happy, economy boosting truth that Microsoft was the only corporation that could lay claim to one. Microsoft’s wildly expensive AI server, something frequently described as a data center, is located in Iowa. Which in so many ways is the point. Not only was AI server work a future concept, it’s not as though Microsoft had located what would prove transformative in Seattle, Austin, or Boston.

The great news is that Microsoft’s creation existed. This meant that OpenAI had a server on which it could develop its life-changing ChatGPT. The latter explains Microsoft’s 49% ownership of OpenAI. Plainly a great deal for all involved.

Meta similarly lacked an AI server at the outset, and as with Open AI, Meta used Microsoft’s. Which speaks to the progress inherent in the opening of Meta’s new data center in Kansas City, MO.

Some will focus on Meta’s $1 billion investment in Missouri, others on the 100+ operational jobs that the center will support, and still others will reasonably draw excitement from the 1,500+ workers employed in the creation of the highly sophisticated center. The excitement is reasonable, but at the same time there’s so much more.

As Cal-Berkeley professor Enrico Moretti has long articulated, the genius of high-end construction and job creation can’t be limited to the headline jobs. Moretti has long noted that there’s a “jobs multiplier” that powerfully reveals itself when companies like Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI expand their footprints. Investment professionals, investment bankers, bankers, attorneys, chefs, sommeliers, baristas, personal trainers, and all manner of others are employed thanks to the expansion of already big corporations.

From there, consider the positive energy implications of the data center expansion that can hardly be limited to Kansas City. By all accounts these Centers consume copious amounts of energy, and that’s a good thing contra conventional wisdom.

As has already been seen through Microsoft’s collaboration with Constellation Energy in the revival of the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility, clean energy that was formerly non-economic was rendered economic by the collaboration due to the enormous energy needs of data centers.

Meta’s data center will happily expand the need for energy and with it, much greater knowledge of how to meet and exceed required energy needs. In other words, data centers poised to expand knowledge and amplify the human capacity to produce won’t be the only dividends to be had from the development, so will our knowledge of how to power a much more abundant future.

Energy futurist Mark Mills has long made the point that progress never results in less energy usage, and what he’s said is coming true as you read this. It’s not a bad thing, rather it’s a knowledge expanding thing. Figure for much of human existence there was no understanding of how to harness the earth’s abundant resources (think wind, water and oil alone) on the way to the mechanization of so much more.

Data centers don’t just promise progress building on progress. The relentless energy consumption will be its own source of major leaps through more investment in the creation of even better ways of accessing not just known power sources, but much more crucially, the unknowns hiding in plain sight. Production is consumption, and neither is a pejorative. Both are wealth precisely because both are knowledge.

Which indicates yet again that Meta’s opening of its newest data center can’t just be limited to the opening. It’s a signal of something much bigger, of a future having been discovered on the way to the wealth-building discovery of a great deal more.