Old MacDonald and His Data Farm (AI, AI, Oh!)
(SA/2026) [1]
'We live in a world where there is more and more data,
and less and less meaning.' (Jean Baudrillard) [2]
I.
Technically speaking, a server farm is not the same thing as a data centre - even if they are commonly used by people as if synonymous.
So, what's the difference?
Well, a server farm is a collection of computer servers connected together to handle shared computing tasks or large workloads. A data centre, on the other hand, is the physical building or facility that houses the server farm and includes the heavy infrastructure needed to keep everything up and running smoothly.
I've sometimes heard people refer to a data farm, but apparently this is not a recognised term within the tech industry but rather a convenient blend referring to both the server farm and the data centre that contains it.
II.
Whatever we choose to call them, these monstrous facilities for storing, managing, and disseminating data and training AI models are becoming a familiar sight and their number is set to be significantly expanded across the UK [3], despite mounting concerns from the people obliged to live within their digital shadow.
I don't imagine the local wildlife are best pleased either by this development, but in Britain today their survival is no longer even a consideration amongst politicians in thrall to the global tech giants like Google and Microsoft and the corporate investment firms like the Blackstone Group who build and operate the data centres on their behalf.
As a spokesperson for HM Government made clear, data centres are central to the UK's economic future - designating them critical national infrastructure.
And so very real environmental concerns can quietly be pushed to one side, even if the scale and location of these centres - average-sized facilities are around 40,000 square metres and often built on agricultural land in rural areas - significantly alters the landscape.
I know it's convenient to bank and shop online, stream movies, and store shit in the cloud, but I would happily abandon all such activities if it meant these water-guzzling digital farms could be blown up in the morning, before the entire world is reduced to mere data and life is sacrificed in the name of ever-more processing power.
As Baudrillard might say, we are exterminating physical reality just to sustain a digital utopia in which human beings are replaced by chatbots and artificially intelligent machines process an infinite amount of data in order to generate an endless amount of content, but without ever providing a new vision of chaos.
Notes
[1] The photo to which I have added figures is by the American photographer Stephen Voss. It shows a data centre overlooking Tippett’s Hill Cemetery in Sterling, Virginia, and was taken in December 2023.
Voss has been documenting Northern Virginia's huge number of data centres for the past few years and illustrating how they impact on the communities that now exist in their shadow. Some of these photographs feature in a piece in U.S. News: In Pictures: The Uncanny Landscapes of Data Centers (28 April, 2026). Readers who would like to know more about Voss and his work can visit his website: stephenvoss.com
[2] The line is from Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (The University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 79. Note that I am slightly modifying the translation for the purposes of this post - replacing 'information' with 'data'.
[3] There are currently around 480 data centres in the UK and their number is set to increase by almost a fifth over the next five years, according to figures shared with BBC News. See the report by Zoe Kleinman and Krystina Shveda (15 August 2025) on the BBC News website: click here.
