With reports of data center developers interested in the Upper Cumberland, a Tennessee Tech expert said artificial intelligence driving roughly 90 percent of the center’s creation.
Computer Science Professor Dr. Anthony Skjellum said data centers are optimized spaces with large racks of computing. Skjellum said the right combination of servers and graphical processing units can make solving deep learning problems and completing everyday tasks much more efficient.
“Like when you talk to Alexa Plus, it’s got an AI behind it, it’s doing something called inference to listen to your questions and give you good answers,” Skjellum said. “And a lot of training went into that. So there’s computers that run Alexa Plus for you in the background, that’s in a data center.”
Skjellum said the practicality of AI led to the emergence of data centers across the country.
“It’s amazing what large language models can do to automate and make people more efficient,” Skjellum said. “And they also can be used to understand the world in new ways.”
Skjellum said that before the AI revolution, data centers were used for data storage and modeling and simulation. Now, with the emergence of large-scale language models like Grok and ChatGPT, Skjellum said many data centers, or AI factories, are being constructed around the country to run those AI computations.
“You can store large numbers of computer systems that are interconnected with high speed networks and then they connect,” Skjellum said. “And from the data center you have big pipes out with your — just like at home you have an Internet service provider where you have two or more (pipes) — Usually data centers have two or more very high speed Internet service providers to enable those computers to talk to the rest of the world.”
Skjellum said a significant amount of water and electricity goes into a large number of servers to distribute the data.
“One of the things in Tennessee where we have lots of water, one of the cheapest way to get rid of that excess heat is to use evaporative cooling,” Skjellum said.
Skjellum also said a new data center can lead to the creation of 50 to 150 well-paying jobs, although companies should be mindful of where they build large-scale data centers.
Skjellum said data centers can significantly boost the economic development of an area, and boost the leverage and revenue of a locality if done correctly.