With Amazon, it was never about the books. No doubt Amazon began as an online bookseller, but what made its stock attractive through years of losses is what books represented.
If Amazon could modernize buying habits with an online bookstore, it could eventually be what it became: an everything store. Markets are a look ahead, and book sales didn’t appeal to patient investors as much as what online book sales signaled about Amazon’s future potential as something much greater than an online bookstore.
It’s important to remember this with the rise of data centers around the country. Meta recently completed another one in El Paso, TX. The $1.5 billion project will, once operational, employ 100 people. Its construction employed as many as 1,800 workers.
It’s worth adding that El Paso is Meta’s third data center in Texas alone. Meta put $10 billion into the construction of all three.
If asked, most would understandably say that data centers are being created “to store, process, and distribute” vast amounts of data. Translated, the data centers will rapidly bring down the already short wait times for AI-authored searches, paintings, papers, and all manner of other things that the AI-adaptive request.
It all sounds amazing on its face, but the bet here is that broad perception of data center capabilities in no way measures up to the towering reality of their potential. Just as Amazon was much more than a bookstore, it’s no reach to suggest that data centers are about much more than greatly enhanced, low latency searches.
Some will ask what they’re for if not just for searches, and the quick answer to the question is that the future would already be here if it were obvious what it was. Which means there’s no way to foretell the future, but it’s easy to say with confidence that it won’t much look like the present.
Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in the enormous investments being made by Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, X and others in the creation of the data centers. The sizable capital commitments signal confidence on the part of the biggest names in AI technology that the growth potential from the data centers well exceeds the enormous amounts of money required to create them. Since capital is expensive, there’s no room for break even or somewhere close to break even in its allocation.
Which is why the future can’t arrive soon enough. As substantial capital allocations meant to fund data centers indicate, their meaning to how we live, work, play, and get healthy so that we can live, work and play some more will be substantial.
Just as Amazon.com as a source of books in no way resembles what Amazon has become, the cost of data centers signals that their perception in 2025 will in no way resemble how they’re perceived in 2035. Call it a generational thing, but data center will have different meaning depending on when you were born.
Which is what’s so exciting about what’s ahead. The seemingly pedestrian backbone of an information revolution will soon enough be seen as the power source for millions, and eventually billions of mechanized workers and thinkers. This explosion of mechanized capability will enable human specialization in a way that will powerfully drive up the economic value of every labor force participant, and for doing so, will lure into the workforce the formerly lazy and incapable, both rendered intensely industrious and capable by that which does and thinks for us so that we can do and think in ways that most associate with our unique skills and intelligence.
