In all seriousness, welcome to Mystery Data Centers, a satirical travel and lifestyle website designed to shed light on the pervasive and often obscured world of massive computing infrastructure. This project serves as a critical design piece, leveraging satire and irony to explore the ethical, social, and environmental consequences of the global data center boom, particularly those projects intentionally shrouded in secrecy.
The core issue we address is the misalignment between infrastructure owners and the communities they build in. Dozens of data center projects around the world are deliberately concealed behind obscure LLCs, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), and murky ownership structures. This secrecy ensures that the people who live near these resource-intensive, noisy, and rapidly expanding structures often do not know who owns them, what their purpose is, or the true extent of the externalities being foisted onto the community.
We challenge the notion of "false trade-offs," where communities are forced to compromise their land, water, and health so others can benefit from technological advancement. Through this website, we ask: If the global development of massive data centers is a pillar of human progress, then why are so many such projects shrouded in secrecy?
The design of this website employs a deliberate juxtaposition to highlight the ethical concerns: the luxury lifestyle of those making the investments versus the communities bearing the cost. Every feature is a layer of satire designed to expose the mechanisms of harm.
We focus on 11 top data center locations with murky origins, translating real-world news stories into a cheery, high-end travel blog format. This self-referential approach, using AI tools (specifically, ChatGPT) for content generation, emphasizes the uncanny quality of the outputs these data centers generate and continues the project’s satirical vibe.
Each article is paired with a unique, AI-generated image of the proposed data center. These Gemini-created artworks are designed to add a sense of mystery and a terrifying, otherworldly look, symbolizing the fear and uncertainty experienced by the local communities they impose upon.
We deliberately used AI tools to craft the content, and you may spot minor inconsistencies, overly cheerful language, or bizarre suggestions. This is intentional, highlighting the irony of using massive compute power for such low-benefit, imprecise tasks.
We included a data center in Denver, Colorado (a non-mystery owner with unspecified intentions), so that local visitors could easily see how close these massive structures are being built to cities and residential areas, underscoring the immediate impact on urban communities.
The interactive map visually represents the physical footprint and resources data centers consume, tasking users to trace the flow of energy and water to uncover the locations of real AI data centers.
This feature is directly connected to the ethical practice of benefit-to-collateral-damage ratio assessment activity we tried. The idea that you could visualise something like this is cool but at the same time, it is not really useful or accurate. Yet such resources that could be deployed for better use cases are not developed because AI can.
The store features t-shirts and other items for each data center location, with artwork generated using Gemini. We specifically used AI for this low-benefit task to critique the massive amount of compute being deployed for minimal return. This was also a reference to the discussion about AI in Creative Work and its ethical implications. We have purposely left minor AI-generated flaws (like spelling errors or image duplication) in place to highlight the irony and lack of precision in the use of such resource-heavy tools. Merchandise messaging brings the externalities into the foreground which are hard to deny.
To achieve an authentic website feel, we placed satirical ads throughout the site. These advertisements further highlight the often-ignored costs and negative emergent effects these centers have on small, rural communities:
When you narrow your view to a specific town, the harm of data centers such as water scarcity, noise, and heat becomes a direct threat. This expansion damages the very social fabric of places that once held a strong sense of identity and creates a sharp divide: convenience for those who benefit from the digital world, and environmental and social fallout for those who carry its physical weight.
We believe that we must take this issue seriously before the gap between benefit and harm becomes irreversible. Our call to action begins with acknowledging these real consequences, questioning who gains and who loses, and insisting that every future project considers the community as a living, evolving group of people, not just an invisible unit of land. The future of technology should not come at the cost of the communities that give a place its character and strength.
This project is designed as a satirical piece to raise awareness, not a comprehensive database. The locations highlighted here represent only a fraction of the global data center expansion, and far more projects exist, often in deeper secrecy. While the issues discussed (resource strain, social displacement) are global, our research and specific examples are more representative of challenges in the United States. We acknowledge that problems in other countries are even more complex and require further research. Furthermore, certain parts of this website are static, as the core goal was to convey these urgent ethical ideas rather than focus on full functionality or real-time data integration.
Disha Gundecha, Sam Jarzembowski, Michael Kwolek, Ryan Ong, Aiden Zavala
We would like to acknowledge Professor Dr. Nikolaus Klassen for all his help throughout the semester and the project development.