People already use artificial intelligence to recommend movies and restaurants, answer their questions on social media and help them write emails and code. The technology has even helped train the robots that play games on their smartphones, and it’s likely to become much more widely used in the future. But AI is not without its critics, including those who fear that it will replace workers, threaten human creativity or cause unintended harm to the environment and society.
Amid a boom in AI, many of the biggest tech companies are investing heavily to develop the technology’s infrastructure. This includes radically upgrading how computers are built, housed and powered to accommodate artificial intelligence (AI).
As part of this shift, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company is building a massive new data center in Utah. JPMorgan Chase and Starwood Property Trust will provide a $2 billion loan for the facility, which is intended to be one of the largest data centers in the world.
The facility will serve as the backbone of the AI-driven technology boom, which is expected to increase compute demand by a factor of 10 to 100 times. The growth in demand for computing resources has prompted companies to spend $1 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next few years.