Meta is currently building an $800m data centre in Indiana specifically for AI. 

The design of the centre will include liquid-cooled hardware designed to support the vast computing power needed. 

The centre will create around 100 new jobs and Meta has agreed with the state of Indiana to receive tax benefits. 

The data centre will become operational in 2026 and is the first data centre built specifically for AI by Meta. Previous data centres used for AI by Meta have been updated or modified to deal with the cooling needed for AI.

AI is set to be one of the most disruptive technologies across a variety of sectors and businesses.  

In a 2023 survey conducted by research and analysis company GlobalData, around 57% of respondents answered that AI would pose significant disruption to their industry. Over 50% of respondents also stated that they believed AI was already making an impact in their industry. 

As AI impacts business, there are concerns over the sustainability of the technology. 

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently warned that a major energy breakthrough was needed to sustain AI progress and innovation. 

Data centres already require a huge amount of power to sustain the swathes of data that AI needs. Generative AI can create image or text responses to prompts because it has been trained on a huge amount of data and can use that data to predict what a response may be. 

In its 2023 thematic intelligence report into AI, GlobalData’s research reaffirms that whilst data management is not a unique issue to AI, it is a foundational layer to the technology and sustainability concerns surrounding it must be accounted for. 

GlobalData anticipates that by 2030 the AI market will be worth $909bn.