What’s Scarier Than a Haunted House? An AI Data Center

The owner of a haunted house in Pennsylvania has a new idea to scare his patrons: a terrifying whirlwind of fans, buzzing electricity, and the exhilaration of an overly speculative bubble doomed to pop. That’s right, he wants to build an AI data center. According to a Bloomberg report.

Derek Strine runs Pennhurst Asylum, a haunted house housed inside the abandoned remains of a state-run medical institute. And while the property has been thoroughly monetized—hosting everything from historical tours and photography sessions to overnight “paranormal investigations” when not being used for a classic haunt haunted by ghostly actors (Ooooooooohhh that’s a non-woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooodling to the show’s owner)—the app’s owner has made a debut of late. Capitalism Per BloombergHe designed his 130-acre future home Hyperscalar.

It’s not particularly hard to imagine why Strine would want to change. Converting a state hospital-turned-haunted asylum into a data center facility isn’t necessarily the most straightforward transition in the world, the real estate developer probably understands that land is at a premium, and once it’s standing, running the data center is probably less involved than staffing and managing live events. That said, upstart costs aren’t exactly cheap. Bloomberg reports that Strine and his partners have already poured more than $16 million into the conversion project, and the first phase alone has spent $60 million on engineering and permitting costs. In contrast, Strine bought the haunted house project for $3 million.

The project is also getting a lot of pushback from the community, which doesn’t necessarily like the haunted house project in the first place—but they’ll apparently embrace it as some people like the ghostly presence that reinforces the ever-watchful eyes of Big Tech. Scooby-doo-style painting where the eyes follow you. They described nearby residents’ concerns about dealing with noise pollution and possible water shortages as their supply to cool the data center is cut off. Which, is a good call on their part: plenty of communities have managed to live next to a data center before them deeply unpleasant And potentially unhealthy.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about the haunted-house-to-data-center pipeline is that it’s a shining example of just how deep we are in the potentially unsustainable depths of the AI ​​lifecycle. Not necessarily, there’s no knock on Strine, but Bloomberg notes that it has no experience building data centers. He only sees dollar signs. And he’s not alone. According to a recent Survey from real estate services firm CBRE95% of real estate investors say they plan to increase their investment in data centers.

If there’s one way that Pennhurst Asylum is the perfect site for a planned data center, it’s this: most of these planned projects never come to fruition. According to According to data center consultancy company ASG, about 90% of announced data centers will never actually be built. They are the center of ghosts. Does it not fit?