On Sept. 26 in downtown Washington, DC, hundreds gathered for Data After Dark: A Pro-Data Center Party.

Among them were protesters, three of whom I saw rush the stage hours later to deliver largely inaudible rants.

One thanked the crowd for “using all of our water,” according to a video shot from a better vantage point than my own. She then flipped the audience double birds. One attendee reportedly advised her to "go on a diet."

Shouts of “USA! USA!” and booing drowned out the protesters.

Organizer Jonas Du, a writer for Pirate Wires, first conceived of the event as a house party. Public interest was overwhelming. So the event, cohosted by R Street Institute fellow Ed Tarnowski and Young Voices CEO Casey Given, moved to PubKey, a “bitcoin bar” in Penn Quarter. By the time the doors opened at 8:30 p.m., more than 1,000 people had RSVP'd on Partiful.

Why did I go to a pro-data center party?

I went because I support building data centers, and because I was curious what a pro-data center party would look like. Would it be held inside a data center? (Sadly, no, though one attendee reportedly said his "mom and dad met at a data center," a touching tribute to the power of compute.)

Data centers are buildings that house information technology equipment such as servers and routers. Those servers host websites and apps, run cloud services such as email and online banking, and power messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. If you've ever Googled something, a data center found you the answer.

There are more than 3,000 operational data centers in the United States. Most skeptics don't object to data centers themselves, just to building new, bigger ones. The average data center covers 100,000 square feet; hyperscale centers can sprawl across 10 million.

Artificial intelligence is driving the boom. Critics point to water use, a problem that closed-loop cooling, already in some Oracle facilities, goes a long way toward solving. About 45% of U.S.........

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