Stephan FabelI’d be interested in people’s thoughts and opinions about data centers. I think there are plenty of concerns around them, especially the energy portion of them.
My thoughts: AI will penetrate into almost everything over the next ten years. Currently, the focus is on bottom line (lay offs) and the trivial (“generate pictures”).
But the real fear is that a broad workforce development effort is lacking. My proposal would then be to rebrand data centers into innovation centers, focus on making them accessible to universities and vocational training programs, and create a new class of jobs or uplevel existing ones so as to prepare the broader workforce to thrive in an AI economy. So each data centers becomes an educational campus.
Case in point: Texas is 120,000 (!) qualified workers short. Electricians, fork lift operators, concrete and HVAC people, etc.
If there was a broad workforce development program implemented, not only would these people not be laid off, they’d have a wage increase of about 30%.