Infrastructure Photography and the AI Data Center Building Boom

Abstract

The “AI revolution” has spurred a data center building boom, clearing forests and farmlands and erecting in their place one enormous cement warehouse after another. This essay considers efforts underway to photographically document the data center building boom, examining how photorealism is being used to shape perceptions about the industrial expansion of the computing infrastructure. To understand the relationship between AI and photographic culture, it seems important to include these efforts to visualize data infrastructure expansion. This article examines data center photography in a selection of U.S. press coverage and corporate public relations. On the one hand, data center photography provides an important corrective to the impression that AI is an immaterial technology, devoid of an industrial basis, and the corresponding assumption that AI has little or no environmental impact. On the other hand, even when situated in the context of critical media coverage, photographic realism is well-suited to the ownership claims of capital. Photographs always offer fragmentary and incomplete views, but every data center photo makes an implicit statement about who owns and controls the computing infrastructure, the land that it occupies, and the future being captured before our eyes.