How AI Data Centers Will Help Save You From Death

While I was never a super fan, Dolly Parton has always been a larger than life, benevolent presence in my life. By all accounts, she was funny, smart, beautiful, and kind.

Now, she’s dead at 80, from old age. And she’s just one of ~115,000 people who will die of old age today. Unless we find a cure, you and everyone you know and love will die from aging.

Death from aging was once an inevitability. When that was true, fatalism made sense. If nothing can be done to stop it, there is no point in wasting time worrying about death.

But now we have an increasingly larger chest of tools with which to find the causes and cures for aging.

Artificial intelligence software, such as those provided by U.S. firms (OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX) and Chinese firms (Deepseek, z.ai, Moonshot.ai) is revolutionizing scientific research.

With AI:

• Experiments that once took months can be done in days.

• Data that was far too complex and voluminous to be analyzed by humans can now be analyzed by tireless AIs.

• AIs can make connections between disparate fields that humans couldn’t learn in a lifetime.

• Robots will soon be able to carry out most of the experimental drudgery at a pace no human could match.

These powerful AI tools currently require beefy computer hardware. This hardware, in turn, requires large amounts of electricity and cooling.

The housing, cooling, and electricity for AI software / hardware are provided by companies called data centers.

Scientific research currently takes up about 3-5% of data center capacity. Researchers compete primarily with business users for server time–most data center capacity goes toward providing traditional hosted services, such as websites, databases, and enterprise software. Most AI compute capacity also serves business purposes, such as writing code, business reports, and editing images/video.

The more data centers come online, the more compute becomes available for all purposes, and the less expensive it becomes. The more powerful, less expensive AIs become, the more and better experiments anti-aging scientists can run.

So, when data centers are blocked by NIMBYs, scientific progress into the causes and cures of aging (and other diseases) is slowed.

And for every day that a cure for aging is blocked, ~115K people die.

Don’t let the anti-AI / anti-data center NIMBYs stop the tech that is accelerating the search for a cure for aging. Don’t be fatalistic. We might have lost Dolly Parton, but there are many more we could save.

Call to Action

Here’s what you can do:

• Speak up when data center NIMBYs spread misinformation about data center water / electricity use. Follow @cremieuxrecueil, @perrymetzger on Twitter or Andy Masley on Substack.
• Vote for pro-free market, pro-AI politicians. (Slim pickings, I know). Asking grok about the politicians in your district is probably the best way to find the least worst candidates.
• Donate to pro-AI advocacy groups like Alliance for the Future or the AI Alliance.
• Buy AI services from firms that don’t lobby for protectionist regulations, such as Nous Research, x.ai, Stability AI and open weight / open source Chinese firms (Deepseek, z.ai, Moonshot.ai) that don’t lobby in the US.

If we can stop the doomers/NIMBYs, we will be able to save more icons like Dolly Parton in the future.