Sean James, a lead engineer at Nvidia, explains in an essay why massive AI facilities must become as invisible as electrical substations and how 113-degree coolant will make them less demanding on the environment.
Sean James, a prominent engineer at Nvidia, spent two decades designing and building data centers at Microsoft. Today, in the era of explosive artificial intelligence growth, his goal is clear and somewhat paradoxical: he wants these massive structures to disappear. Not physically, but to become so integrated into everyday life-like electrical substations or water towers-that no one notices them anymore.
James recalls how, until recently, he had to convince people that data centers even existed. "It's only in the last five years that people know what a data center is," he writes in his essay for Business Insider. Last month, while cleaning his home office, he found notes from 2015. At the top of the page, among his three main career goals, was written: "make the data center disappear." That goal, he says, is more relevant than ever.
He draws inspiration from the words of scientist Mark Weiser, published in Scientific American in September 1991: "The most profound technologies are those that disappear." James explains that he's not talking about hiding. Technology matures until it blends into daily life and stops demanding attention. "Two decades ago, the focus was on keeping data centers invisible by ensuring they were always operational and never a source of outages," he notes.
Today, however, they are highly visible and noisy. James admits he wouldn't want to live next to one. In May 2026, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued a rare Level 3 alert, the highest severity. The trigger was an event where more than 1,000 megawatts of data center load dropped off the grid in seconds. James explains the mechanism: when data centers sense a voltage dip, they automatically disconnect from the grid and switch to their own batteries to protect sensitive servers. The computers keep running without a flicker, but the power grid suffers a shock. "This kind of disappearing makes our grid unstable," he warns.
Still, James is optimistic because he's witnessed decades of progress. The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric for data centers has dropped from values of 3 to 5 in the 1990s to today's 1.2 to 1.5. Waste has been drastically reduced, and on-site safety has become an absolute priority. But the biggest leap is yet to come. This summer, Nvidia unveiled a design that uses coolant at temperatures up to 113 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the water in a hot tub. At that temperature, heat exchangers and outside air can dissipate the heat in most climates. "No cooling towers. Water consumption for cooling on site drops to zero," James emphasizes. Even diesel generators are starting to disappear from blueprints, replaced by advanced batteries and fuel cells.
James believes that criticism of data centers is important and largely accurate. "Data center designers can't improve in a vacuum," he says. He calls on local authorities to modernize building codes so that development meets the needs of the communities hosting them. His ultimate goal is clear: data centers must become so efficient, sustainable, and unobtrusive that they simply blend into the backdrop of modern life, just like the substations that daily, unnoticed, power thousands of homes.
