Sorry if this appears obtuse, but what exactly is an “AI Data Center”?

Is it a data center with nothing but GPUs, that does nothing but inference all day and all night?

Is it a data center custom-built for only AI companies to use?

Do these “AI Data Centers” have data storage? VPS? …

Or, as I suspect, is “AI Data Center” simply a fake media buzzword that really means “Normal Data Centers” but with political baggage and stigma built-in.

It's a data centre being build specifically to run LLMs (and possibly other ML models). As such, it will be focused on NVIDIA servers with large numbers of inter-connected GPUs (so they can run the 2T-4T parameter models from OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) [1].

It's a different build-out to a data centre that can host video/YouTube content (fast CPU, no GPU, large number/size of hard drives), or that can run web servers (fast CPUs, low to average hard drive capacity).

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/

> Or, as I suspect, is “AI Data Center” simply a fake media buzzword that really means “Normal Data Centers” but with political baggage and stigma built-in.

No you're absolutely right. The only difference that I can tell is power requirements are legitimately higher because GPUs consume more electricity. More cooling is also needed because there's more heat generated. Aside from those two things, it's a plain old datacenter that companies have been building at break neck speeds since like 1996. Now that I think about it, how come there's no panic about additional Internet backbone capacity needed to support these "AI datacenters"?