Data centers are being built across Texas every day. Here’s what goes on inside one in Austin

From KUT News:

Tommy Minyard remembers University of Texas at Austin officials laughing at him when his team requested more space for their data center on campus back in 2005. He needed 15,000 square feet and 10 megawatts of electricity — enough energy to power roughly 5,000 single-family homes.

“They said, ‘No, no, no, we’re gonna give you one megawatt of power and 5,000 square feet,’” said Minyard, the director of advanced computing systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). “We filled up the one megawatt of power the next year.”

More than 20 years later, TACC is expanding its footprint again. Minyard’s team is constructing a new data center in Round Rock, which he said will be like going from a block of homes to a small city.

Data centers — facilities that house massive computers used for things like data storage and artificial intelligence processing — are popping up everywhere. The TACC’s new facility is one of nearly 250 being planned for the state, according to an analysis from The Texas Tribune. Even if they don’t all pan out, Texas could surpass Virginia as the state with the most data centers in the U.S., according to a report from real estate firm JLL.

AI data center proposals have sparked uproar in city council meetings and door-to-door neighborhood protests. A recent Texas Politics Project poll found 42% of Texans “strongly oppose” data centers.

This led KUT News to ask some questions. What actually is a data center? Why are so many of them coming to Texas?

To find out, we requested tours of several data centers in Hays, Travis and Williamson counties. Most companies either declined or did not respond. But the TACC let us peek behind the curtain.

But first … a brief history

Data centers are getting bigger and more powerful, but they aren’t anything new.

The first data center in the country was built by the U.S. Army in 1946 for military defense projects. In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, they started popping up all over the country, including in Texas, to support cloud computing as the world shifted from relying on jump drives and floppy disks to remote servers on the internet.

Data centers have also been built to support complex science, but for years, a primary function of data centers has been to store information — everything from bank transactions to medical records to memes shared on social media.

But there’s a reason why you might just be learning about data centers now. More companies are investing in data centers that support artificial intelligence, which demand more land, power and water.

Inside a data center

On the outside, the TACC just looks like a warehouse. But on the inside, it looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Rows upon rows of computer servers are stacked on top of each other throughout the room. The servers are densely packed and constantly running.

It’s painfully loud inside. The noise is generated by over 500 fans working to cool the stacks of machines, which generate heat — like your laptop after working all day without a lunch break — that needs to be dissipated for the servers to function properly.

Minyard said the heat generated by computer servers is a main challenge for data centers. The servers need to be cooled somehow, and big environmental trade-offs come with each option.

Air cooling with fans is loud and requires a lot of electricity. Evaporative cooling uses less electricity, but it’s noisy and water intensive. Minyard said TACC experimented with using solar panels on the building’s roof to power some of its servers, but found they only generated enough electricity to power three of its server racks — a tiny portion of the data center.

A small section of servers at TACC are cooled by submerging them in mineral oil. That method — called immersion cooling — uses far less water and electricity than other options, but it hasn’t picked up on a mass scale because it’s expensive and hard to maintain.

“We’d love to have better technology to do cooling,” Minyard said. “But right now in Texas we just don’t have anything really effective here for us.”

What are all those servers doing?

TACC is funded by the National Science Foundation, and most of its servers are busy crunching data that scientists use to study things like climate change, medicine and even outer space. TACC was one of the few systems capable of processing images of the earliest galaxies from the James Webb Telescope.

Tom Yankeelov, a researcher who works at UT, is using the TACC to find a cure for cancer.

“What we’re trying to do is build mathematical techniques that let us have the patient come in with their diagnosis and then predict how they’re gonna respond to an array of different therapeutic interventions,” Yankeelov said. “Then [we] simulate that outcome and then pick the one that looks like the best chance of winning.”

Yankeelov’s models can also predict where cancer will spread most aggressively so patients can proactively increase radiation doses to those areas. The science hasn’t been tested in a clinical trial yet, but Yakeelov said preliminary studies show the prediction models can extend survival in cancer patients.

The TACC is mostly used for dense mathematical processing required in work like Yankeelov’s. Other data centers use their servers to store information. But more and more data centers are popping up to serve a new need. Chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT require more computers trained in the less efficient process of artificial intelligence.

Danielle Ellsworth, a professor of computer science at Colorado College, explains that AI works something like this: When you ask Google a question, it gives you a list of resources, like a librarian pulling specific books for you that might answer your question.

When you ask AI a question, it tries to read all of those books and answer that question based on what it “remembers.” Like human memory, that sort of recalling is fallible.

“Computing is inherently physical,” Ellsworth said. “Down at the lowest level of what’s going on, we have a bunch of transistors, which are like light switches that have to flip on and off.”

Since AI is more computationally expensive, companies developing AI need more light switches, which takes more computers, which takes more space, which takes more data centers.

Why are data centers coming to Texas?

If data centers need ample power and water to function, why would developers build them in Texas, a drought-ridden state with a notoriously unreliable power grid?

Mike Kamerlander, president and CEO of the Hays Caldwell Economic Development Partnership, said Texas has two big things going for it that make it a popular destination for data center developers: cheap land and a friendly regulatory environment.

“ Our track record says this is a good place to do any type of development, and data centers are no different,” Kamerlander said.

The data centers that are being proposed and built in Texas are some of the biggest in the country because developers have access to the resources they need to get projects up and running fast.

Cheap land allows data center developers to build bigger campuses that can train AI models faster.

Additionally, Texas’ grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, has historically made it easy for new businesses to get up and running as long as the power is available.

Kamerlander said he’s concerned about how much water data centers use and whether they’ll create long-term jobs, but it’s undeniable that the region is a desirable place for data center developers.

“I can assure you we’re not out there trying to get them to move here,” Kamerlander said. “They’re coming here anyway.”

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