AI 101

Data center

Also known as: datacenters

Basics

A data center is a physical building full of servers, GPUs, cooling, and power — where frontier models are trained and where cloud APIs serve your requests.

It’s the “cloud” made concrete:

  • Enormous power draw (megawatts).
  • Heavy cooling requirements.
  • The reason AI has a real carbon and electricity footprint.

When you use an API: your prompt physically travels to a data center, gets processed on GPUs there, and the answer comes back. That trip is the cloud.