I build AI data centers. I want them to disappear from view.

This first-person essay was written by Sean James, a distinguished engineer in energy systems at Nvidia, where he works on the power and energy infrastructure needed to support AI data centers. He previously spent more than two decades at Microsoft designing and building data centers.

Chances are you passed an electrical substation today that delivers power to thousands of homes at hundreds of thousands of volts. It was so unremarkable that you didn’t even notice. Sometime in the past, these marvels of engineering simply vanished into the background.

For most of my career, when asked, I told people I built data centers. And only in the last five years did people know what one even was. I still don’t think my mom knows what I do. Contrast that with today and how often I get calls and see texts asking this and that about data centers. Mostly, it’s questions about water usage and energy demand. Data centers went from large concrete buildings assumed to be just another warehouse to headline news. And I want them to disappear again.

I recently left Microsoft where I spent 25 years operating, designing, building, and toward the end, innovation. Innovation was all about making data centers less resource intensive, faster to build, and modular so they would come together like Lego bricks. Last month, while cleaning out my home office, I came across a page of notes from 2015. Scrawled across the top: Top 3 Career Goals. One of them read:…