What Do Data Centers and Pac-Man Have in Common?
If you picture AI as PacMan "eating" the Internet and data centers as the coins "powering" the game, you'll start to get the gist of what is happening behind the scenes of AI development...
The “ingredients” of AI are pretty straightforward: data + models (”the math”) + computing power. This has been true for decades. As each of these ingredients grows in capacity and strength, we lurch forward.
Of course, when generative AI burst onto the stage, it was less of a lurch and more of a roller coaster drop that has been doing loops and twists ever since. The implications of what has been unleashed are now visible in ways that go far beyond new tools coming to market.
We’re seeing these implications manifest in the massive physical infrastructure required to power AI development—a reality increasingly unwanted by communities across the country (and the world).
What are Data Centers?
In simple terms, data centers are massive, physical warehouses filled with powerful computers that store, process, and run the AI applications we use daily. They’re where the computing power happens—making our family’s digital interactions possible.
These big, energy-intensive physical structures are hard to miss when they appear. And as AI innovation and applications grow, the demand of the space to locate them grows. Something increasingly (and understandably) unwelcome in communities.
Just a couple of headlines from this week:
“Data centers are spiking electricity costs in Maryland. It’s the ‘tip of the iceberg,’ one expert warns,” CNN, November 14, 2025
“Data centers are surging—but so are the protests against them,” Fast Company, November 18, 2025
“Will data center demands strain Archbald power, water, wildlife?,” The Times Tribute, November 14, 2025
Impact on the Community
What makes these centers hard to miss is their massive footprint. A data center can range from 200,000 to over 1 million square feet. To put that in perspective, a typical football field is about 57,000 square feet, so the largest data centers equal 15-20 football fields in size. It’s hard to wrap your head around the sheer scale, and even harder to imagine where this all goes?
While facilities can bring high-paying tech jobs and generate tax revenue for local communities, many aren’t comfortable with the tradeoffs—in particular, the electrical demands and stress put upon local infrastructure. It’s an international issue too as there has been a tendency to locate these in countries where governments have been willing to sell land, water, electricity and other resources to Big Tech firms.
Research firm Data Center Watch has been tracking grassroots opposition to data center development across the United States and over the past two years. In their Q2 2025 report, 20 projects worth $98 billion in the US were facing opposition by local communities.
It’s a sign of things to come, of course, as many more of us face this type of intrusion into our communities. But without these structures we also won’t see the type of innovation that many companies (and consumers) are hungry for.
Data Centers and the Pac-Man Analogy
The impact of AI development is taking other forms as well. The internet as we know it is facing unprecedented demands for its data.
As consumers, we know that “training” AI models requires massive amounts of data, much of which comes from the internet. How is that achieved? Companies unleash bots to “crawl” and “scrape” high-quality content.
This isn’t a new process. If you’ve ever visited a shopping search engine, you’ll see product descriptions and images collected from retailer websites and made “searchable” in one location. That information is often “scraped” from retailers.
But the scale has intensified dramatically with AI development. Companies are now systematically collecting data from across the internet to train AI models, seeking out any content considered “high quality” for their datasets.
As someone who researches and creates this type of content, my website is a prime target for machine-driven content scraping. This week I had a shock when I noticed that a high percentage of traffic was coming specifically from Lanzhou, China and Singapore.
I knew there were large data centers in Singapore, and a quick search showed that China was building some of its largest new data centers in the region where Lanzhou sits.
This systematic content collection is happening at massive scale. I checked analytics.usa.gov, which tracks traffic to thousands of US federal websites, and found that over the past 90 days, the same geographic traffic pattern was emerging. More than 20% of traffic to federal sites was also coming from these same two locations—Lanzhou and Singapore.
While we can’t definitively conclude what this traffic represents, the timing and specificity suggest that the race to develop AI is creating new patterns in how our digital content is being accessed, often without website owners being explicitly informed about how their content might be used.
What makes this pattern even more significant is that 51% of all internet traffic now comes from machines rather than humans, and many modern bots are AI-driven, meaning they can learn, adapt, and mimic human behavior in ways that make them much harder to detect.
It’s not just the international traffic either. As I looked at the top cities sending traffic to my own website some were unfamiliar to me such as Boardman, Oregon, which is an Amazon data center. All of this illustrates what we are hearing in the news about a new “Cold War” between the US and China to scale AI innovation.
What Does it All Mean?
For families, this illustrates the incredible scope and scale of AI development happening around us. There’s a race manifesting itself in how the web is changing—right down to our local communities and the business infrastructure we’ve grown to rely on.
With such massive bot-related traffic, website owners can’t trust their analytics, advertisers can’t trust their engagement metrics, and content creators are seeing their work systematically harvested without consent.
Within the next 18 months, we may see a fundamental shift in recognition of this new reality. We may need to acknowledge that the “internet” is becoming primarily a machine-to-machine environment with humans as a minority presence—with much of our activity moving to AI-mediated platforms.
This matters to families for three key reasons:
First, while it’s tempting to postpone seriously engaging with generative AI tools, that time has passed. These traffic patterns signal the transformative scale of AI development happening around us. Second, the internet as we know it will be gone sooner than we think. We’ll be experiencing it differently as AI functionality becomes built-in, reshaping how we discover news, find small businesses, and interact with information online.
Finally, with data centers arriving in communities and straining local infrastructure, we need to understand how these developments align with our values and what tradeoffs we’re willing to accept.
We’ve been heading in this direction for a long time, but now it’s crucial to understand what this transformation means for you and your family today.