DC’s hottest party last weekend was called Data After Dark, and it had everything: tech bros in Meta glasses, dancing bitcoin miners, neoliberal Kick streamers, AI photo booths, and a Bitcoin-sponsored whiskey activation – all packed into a crypto-founder’s bar along with hundreds of other people who, from all the press coverage, seem pretty horny for data centers.
One attendee explained her enthusiasm by saying, “I love the internet.” Another said it’s because the only “engine that can propel the S&P 500 to even greater heights” is “compute.” One man offered perhaps the most compelling argument of all: “My mother and father met a data center. So if data centers weren’t here, neither would I be.”
Hard to argue with that. But the purpose of the big data bacchanal, which took place about an hour from the data center capital of the world in Loudoun County, Virginia, wasn’t just to drink “Loudon County Iced Teas” in front of “Virginia is for Servers” signage. It was to, in the words of the party’s organizer, “make the connections that might be necessary to solve the [data center] PR crisis.”
Unfortunately for data center enthusiasts, it’s a PR crisis that their most prominent boosters seem to be making much worse…