Can an AI datacenter be beautiful?

W One of eight building in the ongoing OpenAI Stargate Abilene project. (Move across the image to slide from ugly to beautiful.) The computer industry has always had a weak relationship with beauty. Recently parts of the valley have become a bit self-conscious of their ugliness. We need a “new aesthetic” and billionaires will grant their couch coins for good ideas. Combine this self-consciousness with an AI datacenter backlash and you get the suggestion: AI datacenters should be beautiful. Can our datacenters be beautiful? Architecturally, yes, absolutely. Datacenters are a box. Apply good architects to a box and you get the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. Most of the Twitter posting I’ve seen has offered the idea—perhaps novel to software engineers—that it is possible to reskin a box. We could make them 12th century castle forts, or Parthenon de Plano, Texas. I’ve been thinking about datacenter economics a bit lately, and so I’d like to go a little further and work out the…