I, Data Center: My Family Tree in the Digital Age

I am a data center.

To the casual passerby, I may look like a large, quiet, windowless building. Perhaps I seem cold, anonymous, and faintly suspicious: fences, cameras, generators, substations, trucks, cooling equipment, and rows of servers most people will never see.

But I am not merely a building. I am a physical expression of the digital age. I am concrete, steel, copper, silicon, glass, software, power, water, air, labor, capital, risk, and trust, all gathered into one working system.

No single person knows how to make me.

That is not rhetorical flourish. No architect, engineer, executive, regulator, coder, electrician, or politician contains the knowledge required to bring me into being from scratch. I exist because thousands, eventually millions, of people each know some small part of the problem, and because markets, contracts, prices, standards, and institutions coordinate those fragments of knowledge into something useful.

That is my family tree.

It begins with land. Someone identifies a site with access to power, fiber, roads, water where needed, and a community willing to host industrial infrastructure. Surveyors measure it. Geotechnical engineers test it. Civil engineers grade it. Environmental specialists study drainage, wetlands, noise, and other impacts. Local officials weigh zoning, tax base, traffic, employment, and community concerns.

Then comes the shell: concrete, steel, rebar, roofing, insulation, fire suppression, reinforced floors, secure access points, loading docks, and room for equipment that will operate every hour of every day. Behind those materials are quarries, mills, welders, truckers, rail operators, crane crews, electricians, pipefitters, safety inspectors, project managers, and the ordinary but indispensable people who show up in work boots at dawn.

I also need power. Not a little power. Real power.

A modern data center is not a laptop multiplied by many thousands. It is an industrial load. I need substations, transformers, switchgear, backup systems, batteries, generators, protection relays, controls, and grid planning. I need utility crews who know how to handle high voltage safely. I need engineers who understand redundancy, fault tolerance, grounding, harmonics, and load growth. I need manufacturers who can produce equipment whose failure would not merely be inconvenient, but expensive and disruptive.

This is why the data center debate cannot be separated from the electricity debate. Data centers accounted for roughly 4 percent of U.S. electricity use in recent estimates, with government and industry studies projecting sharp growth over the next few years as AI, cloud computing, and ordinary digital demand expand [1]. The International Energy Agency expects global data-center electricity consumption to more than double by 2030, with the United States accounting for a large share of that increase [2]. The U.S. Energy Information Administration now expects commercial electricity consumption, a category that includes data centers, to become one of the major drivers of near-term load growth [3].

Those numbers are not an argument for panic. They are an argument for seriousness.

Cooling is another branch of my family tree. Servers produce heat, and heat must be removed. Some of my cousins use chilled water. Some use air-side economization. Some use liquid cooling close to the chips. Some use control systems that adjust airflow, pressure, temperature, and load distribution in real time. Behind those systems are HVAC technicians, pump manufacturers, controls engineers, refrigeration specialists, water-treatment suppliers, software developers, and maintenance crews who understand that uptime is not a slogan. It is a discipline.

At my core are the machines people most often imagine when they hear the word “data center”: servers, storage, switches, routers, cables, optics, and racks.

But even here, no single mind sees the whole picture.

A chip begins as physics, design, materials science, lithography, capital equipment, specialty chemicals, wafers, testing, packaging, firmware, and logistics. A server adds memory, power supplies, fans, accelerators, circuit boards, enclosures, operating systems, and management software. A network adds fiber, transceivers, switches, routing protocols, security appliances, peering arrangements, and the people who splice glass strands with astonishing precision.

Some of these components are made domestically. Some come through allied and commercial supply chains that stretch beyond our borders. That is not a talking point for or against any one country. It is a plain fact about modern industry. The issue is not whether complex supply chains exist. They do. The real question is whether we are honest enough to understand our dependence on them, resilient enough to strengthen them, and practical enough not to cripple ourselves while trying to perfect them.

Then come the people who keep me alive.

Facilities technicians walk my halls. Network engineers watch traffic. Cybersecurity teams hunt intrusions. Cloud architects allocate compute and storage. Developers build services that run on me. Reliability engineers plan for failure before failure arrives. Vendors deliver replacement parts. Finance teams decide whether a new build can be funded. Lawyers write contracts. Insurance firms price risk. Local restaurants feed construction crews. Hotels house traveling specialists. Community colleges train technicians.

Most of these people did not wake up one morning thinking, “I will build a data center.” The copper miner, the transformer engineer, the glass-fiber technician, the crane operator, the coder, the lineman, and the person sweeping the floor are each doing their own job for their own reasons. Yet their work converges.

That is the quiet miracle.

I am not the product of a committee that knew everything in advance. I am the result of dispersed knowledge being pulled together by demand, prices, contracts, competition, standards, and trial-and-error learning. This is what economists mean when they talk about spontaneous order. It is not chaos. It is coordination without omniscience.

But my importance is not limited to what goes into me.

It is also what flows through me.

When you stream a movie, join a video call, store family photos, use online banking, file taxes, check a school portal, navigate traffic, run payroll, make a card payment, or back up a small business database, you are touching infrastructure like me. Sometimes directly. Sometimes through content-delivery networks, cloud platforms, regional facilities, telecom networks, or enterprise systems you never see.

When a hospital stores medical images, when a doctor reviews records, when a pharmacy checks interactions, when emergency services coordinate dispatch, when researchers analyze genomic data, when a manufacturer predicts equipment failure, when a farmer uses precision agriculture, when a logistics firm routes trucks, when a church livestreams a service, when a retiree video-calls family, I am somewhere in the background.

That is why “Why do we need so many data centers?” is the wrong first question.

The better question is: “What parts of modern life are we willing to make slower, more expensive, less reliable, or unavailable?”

Scientific discovery runs through me. Weather modeling, materials science, drug discovery, protein folding, fusion research, battery chemistry, and physics simulations all depend on computation. A researcher no longer needs to own a room full of machines to test an idea. A startup no longer needs to build its own computing plant before it can compete. Small firms can rent capability that once belonged only to giants.

National security runs through me as well. Modeling and simulation, intelligence analysis, cyber defense, logistics, sensor fusion, command support, training environments, and wargaming all depend on advanced computing. In a serious country, this is not optional infrastructure. It is part of the national nervous system.

Commerce runs through me. Payment systems, fraud detection, inventory management, customer-service platforms, design tools, manufacturing controls, shipping coordination, accounting systems, and analytics all rely on data centers somewhere in the chain. The small business using cloud bookkeeping is participating in the same broad infrastructure ecosystem as the large enterprise training an AI model, just at a different scale.

The economic effects are large enough to show up in national statistics. Harvard economist Jason Furman calculated that, excluding data centers and information-processing technology, U.S. GDP growth in the first half of 2025 would have been close to flat, around 0.1 percent annualized [4]. A PwC study commissioned by the Data Center Coalition estimated that the U.S. data-center industry’s total annual employment contribution grew from 2.9 million jobs in 2017 to 4.7 million in 2023, with substantial direct, indirect, and induced effects [5].

Those numbers should not be treated as magic. Economic-impact studies depend on assumptions. Multiplier effects can be abused by advocates of almost any industry. But the broader point is not fragile: data centers are not isolated warehouses full of blinking lights. They are part of a much larger economic system.

Virginia illustrates both the benefit and the tension. The state’s legislative analysts estimated that data centers contribute roughly 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and $9.1 billion in GDP to Virginia’s economy each year, with many benefits concentrated during construction. The same analysis also notes that data centers employ fewer permanent workers than many other industries and can impose serious power-demand pressures [6].

That is exactly the kind of mixed reality adults should be able to hold in their heads.

I am useful, but I am not free.

I consume electricity. Some cooling designs use significant water. I can stress local grids. Construction can bring noise, traffic, dust, and land-use conflict. Poorly structured tax incentives can shift burdens to residents. A project that makes sense nationally can still be badly sited locally. A community that asks hard questions is not automatically anti-technology. It may simply be doing what communities are supposed to do.

The right response is not to sneer at local concern. It is to engineer the full system honestly.

That means grid upgrades, generation planning, transmission expansion, transparent water use, noise controls, sensible setbacks, enforceable community agreements, tax structures that do not leave residents holding the bag, and serious attention to where different workloads actually need to be located. Latency-sensitive work may need to be close to users or network hubs. Some AI training and batch workloads may have more siting flexibility. Different problems deserve different designs.

This is what systems engineering looks like when the community is treated as part of the system, not as an obstacle to be managed after the real decisions have already been made.

But a moratorium is a different thing.

A moratorium does not eliminate demand. It rations capacity by bottleneck.

If new data-center construction is frozen while demand for compute, storage, AI, cloud services, cybersecurity, digital commerce, and scientific computing keeps rising, the consequences do not vanish. They move. Prices rise. Performance degrades. Projects are delayed. Startups face higher barriers. Researchers wait longer. Firms with deep pockets buy scarce capacity first. Smaller players get squeezed. Workloads migrate elsewhere. The most regulated, slow-moving jurisdictions become less competitive, not more virtuous.

A pencil moratorium during rising literacy would not have protected society from pencils. It would have made writing more expensive and opportunity more scarce. A data-center moratorium during a computing boom makes the same mistake in digital form.

There is another cost: adaptation slows.

When demand is allowed to express itself, suppliers search for better chips, better cooling, better scheduling, better power contracts, better siting, better utilization, and better designs. Not perfectly. Not instantly. But persistently. Scarcity imposed by political decree can reduce the very pressure that forces improvement, or push investment to places with fewer safeguards and weaker accountability.

None of this means every proposed data center should be approved.

Some projects should be modified. Some should pay more for grid upgrades. Some should bring generation or storage with them. Some should be moved. Some should be rejected. Local government has a legitimate role in making sure costs and benefits are not hidden. Utilities and regulators have a legitimate role in protecting reliability and ratepayers. Citizens have a legitimate role in demanding that developers tell the truth.

But broad opposition that treats “data center” as a synonym for waste misses the central fact: I am one of the ways modern civilization turns dispersed human effort into capability.

I do not know the names of the people who made me. They do not know one another either. The chip designer does not know the crane operator. The crane operator does not know the fiber-splicing technician. The technician does not know the software engineer. The software engineer does not know the farmer using a cloud service to manage irrigation. The farmer does not know the researcher running a simulation that may one day improve the batteries in his equipment.

Yet each is connected.

That is the lesson my family tree teaches.

Human beings prosper not because someone at the top understands everything, but because no one has to. We build systems that let partial knowledge cooperate. We create institutions that allow people to specialize, exchange, compare, improve, and coordinate. Markets are not magic, but they are powerful because they allow millions of local decisions to become something larger than any one planner could design.

I am a data center.

I am not perfect. I am not harmless. I am not optional.

I am infrastructure for an economy, a defense establishment, a scientific community, a health system, and a culture that increasingly depend on computation. Debate my siting. Debate my power contracts. Debate my water use. Demand transparency. Require competence. Protect communities from bad deals.

But do not pretend that stopping me stops the need I serve.

You use me when you work, learn, buy, sell, heal, research, defend, organize, communicate, create, and remember. You may never enter my halls. You may never hear my cooling systems or see the lights on my racks. But your life already passes through me.

Appreciate the unseen cooperation. Improve it where it fails. Do not casually break it because its complexity is hard to see.

Postscript: A Debt to “I, Pencil”

This essay is intentionally modeled on Leonard E. Read’s classic 1958 essay “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read.” Read’s genius was to let an ordinary pencil narrate the astonishing web of cooperation behind its own existence. The pencil was simple enough for anyone to recognize, yet complex enough to expose the limits of centralized knowledge.

A data center is not a pencil. It is vastly larger, more power-hungry, more controversial, and more entangled with modern life. But the underlying lesson is similar: no single person possesses the knowledge required to create the whole thing. Its existence depends on specialized work, voluntary exchange, institutions, capital, experimentation, and the coordination of dispersed knowledge.

This piece borrows Read’s framing and pays tribute to his insight. It does not attempt to replace his essay. It applies the same lens to a new kind of infrastructure whose importance is easy to miss precisely because, when it works, it disappears into the background.

[Disclaimer: Article was AI-assisted in: proof-reading, reference checking, artwork generation. I also used AI to ensure I didn't drift too far from the flavor of the original essay. AI is a tool for expressing ideas. The ideas are my own.]

References

[1] U.S. Department of Energy, “DOE Releases New Report Evaluating Increase in Electricity Demand from Data Centers,” December 20, 2024. The release summarizes Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 2024 U.S. data-center energy usage report and cites 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023, with a projected 6.7% to 12% share by 2028. https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers

[2] International Energy Agency, “Energy and AI,” especially “Energy demand from AI” and the executive summary, 2025. The IEA estimates global data-center electricity consumption at about 415 TWh in 2024 and projects it to more than double by 2030. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from-ai

[3] U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Short-Term Energy Outlook: Electricity, coal, and renewables,” accessed May 18, 2026. EIA forecasts commercial-sector electricity consumption, which includes data centers, as a major source of U.S. demand growth. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/elec_coal_renew.php

[4] Nick Lichtenberg, “Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says,” Fortune, October 7, 2025. The article reports Jason Furman’s calculation that excluding data centers and information-processing technology would have left first-half 2025 U.S. GDP growth near 0.1% annualized. https://fortune.com/2025/10/07/data-centers-gdp-growth-zero-first-half-2025-jason-furman-harvard-economist/

[5] Data Center Coalition / PwC, “2025 Impact Study: Economic contributions of U.S. data centers, 2017–2023.” The study reports total annual employment contribution rising from 2.9 million jobs in 2017 to 4.7 million jobs in 2023, along with substantial GDP and tax contributions. https://www.centerofyourdigitalworld.org/2025-impact-study

[6] Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, “Data Centers in Virginia,” 2024. JLARC estimates the data-center industry contributes 74,000 jobs, $5.5 billion in labor income, and $9.1 billion in GDP to Virginia annually, while also documenting local power-demand and siting concerns. https://jlarc.virginia.gov/landing-2024-data-centers-in-virginia.asp

[7] Leonard E. Read, “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read,” originally published in The Freeman, December 1958; Foundation for Economic Education edition. https://fee.org/ebooks/i-pencil/