Inside a data center that could power our AI future (it’s not where you’d think)

As investors pour billions of dollars into artificial intelligence, the construction of power-hungry data centers has become one of the defining images of the industry. 

But whatever you imagine when you picture a “data center,” chances are, it’s not a historic post office building in downtown Los Angeles, right? 

“We are sitting in, actually, what they used to call the terminal annex for the U.S. Post Office,” said Maile Kaiser, chief revenue officer of CoreSite, which owns 30 data centers across the United States. “It’s next door to Union Station,” she said. “This building was built in 1938, and it was used to transport all of the mail off the train[s] ... and send it on its way.”

From mail being sorted off of trains, to bits of data zooming around the world, the need to move information remains. As artificial intelligence gets deployed across this economy, demand for network infrastructure is increasing. 

There are something like 5,000 data centers in the United States right now. This data center campus includes the old post office building, but is hardwired into a brand new building right next to it that opened in 2020. 

“This is an 18 megawatt purpose-built facility for high-performance data center applications,” said Erick Dela Pena, a Coresite director of sales engineering. 

The AI infrastructure that so much of this economy is betting on right now, and that, as we talked about last week, is getting perilously close to being “too big to fail” depends on data centers — lots of them. 

As part of our series about you and AI, “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal toured CoreSite’s data center campus in Los Angeles. 

Some “hyperscale” data centers, like the ones being built by Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft, are singularly focused on training AI models. 

“Those are single-tenant buildings,” said Kaiser. “It would be all Google. And those can sit somewhere where there's a low cost of power, low cost of real estate, but they're connecting back to the Google network, or the Microsoft network.” 

CoreSite, by contrast, is a “colocation provider.” All kinds of businesses — banks, social media platforms, hospitals — rent server space here. It’s kind of like an apartment building for computing power. 

Those colocation data centers benefit from being in dense metropolitan areas-- close to where users live and work. And the more that AI is integrated across the internet, the more data centers of this type the market will demand. 

Click the play button above to hear Ryssdal’s tour of CoreSite’s data center and conversation with Kaiser.