Colossus, an AI supercomputer in Memphis has a capacity of 280 Megawatts. Eventually, it will yield the same power requirements of 1/3 of Memphis’s peak power demand. The power demand for this new building typology, called “Hyperscale datacenters”, are too large to understand. In Memphis, large methane gas turbines power the center, expelling toxic gas onto residents. These centers don’t just store data, they enclose knowledge, labor, and human attention, concentrating ownership in the hands of a few corporations.
This is a new architecture, a lattice of ownership that stretches from the planetary to the personal. Data centers today rival towns in power consumption. At the other end, a smartphone user becomes a digital laborer, their clicks and content harvested for corporations. Every swipe and upload feeds the network, linking the smartphone in your hand to turbines that poison a city’s air and power demand that consume a town’s power.
Piranesi imagined ruins of vast impossible spaces that magnified the weight of architecture. Today, AI petaflops, megawatts, and terabytes form a numerical sublime. This drawing tries to spatialize the relationships between these disparate scales.
This project was completed in Design Tactics under Prof. Jia Weng.