Robot Crabs And Laser Cats: How Data Centers Got Weird In 2023

Between record leasing and the artificial intelligence boom, 2023 was a banner year for data centers. But the past 12 months also produced a wide range of unconventional and bizarre data center stories. 

From robotic crabs and AI chatbots with loose lips to a data center brought down by a cat and another data center named New York’s ugliest building, these are some of the most head-turning data center headlines from the past year.

Amazon’s AI Chatbot Gives Away Secret Data Center Locations

Amazon’s latest AI creation has been handing out its home address to strangers.

The company’s new AI chatbot, known as Q, is “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data” that includes the closely guarded locations of Amazon Web Services data centers, Platformer reported this month.  

Amazon has pitched Q as a more secure and privacy-oriented alternative to generative AI products like ChatGPT, but leaked company documents indicate that Q has been making confidential internal data available to the general public on everything from data center locations to planned features for future Amazon products to employee discount programs. 

Like all major tech companies, Amazon keeps the locations of its data centers close to the vest. While some of the sites are publicly known through development filings or other legal processes, the bulk of the more than 33M SF of data center space owned or leased by Amazon is kept purposely hidden both for security and to hide trade secrets from competitors. 

But apparently Q never received that memo, according to Platformer. An Amazon spokesperson told the publication Q “has not leaked confidential information.”

Microsoft’s Robot Crabs Are Joining Robot Dogs In The Data Center Workforce

Could robot crabs help data centers claw their way out of the ongoing power pinch? 

In October, Microsoft unveiled its use of “crab robots” as part of an initiative to make data center storage more efficient, known as Project Silica. Through Project Silica, Microsoft has developed a way to store data on laser-etched glass plates rather than on power-intensive servers. Although this kind of storage is only appropriate for data that has to be accessed infrequently, the glass plates can maintain data with no power for around 10,000 years. 

Accessing the data on the glass sheets is where the crabs come in. 

The company has built small autonomous crablike robots that pull the glass panels from racks and bring them to a microscope to be read. According to Data Center Dynamics, Project Silica lead Ant Rowstron has described the crabs as “little robots that operate independently, that can move up and down and along the structure in this crabbing motion.” Microsoft released a video last month showing the crabs at work climbing up and down data storage racks.

Widespread adoption of any of Project Silica’s technology is likely years away, although Rowstron has indicated he anticipates it eventually “becoming a mainstay in Azure data centers across the globe.”

But while it may be a long time before robot crabs are a standard part of Microsoft data centers, 2023 saw a growing number of data center firms turn to canine and humanoid robots. 

Oracle, Digital Realty and Scala are the latest operators to use robotic dogs from companies like Boston Dynamics in their data centers, using the quadruped robots to perform tasks ranging from conducting equipment and fire safety inspections to a number of security roles.   

Asia Pacific colocation provider Digital Edge has begun using an armless, vaguely humanoid robot with a touchscreen face named Nora to bring customers to their racks in the company’s Manila, Philippines, data center. 

New York City's Ugliest Skyscraper Is A Data Center

A 32-story data center in Lower Manhattan has been ranked New York’s ugliest building. 

Sabey Data Centers’ facility at 375 Pearl St., often referred to as the Verizon Building, is the city’s most maligned structure, according to a social media sentiment analysis published by building supply firm Buildworld in January. The study, titled “Global Eyesores,” used analytics tool Hugging Face to identify buildings around the world that received the most criticism and negative commentary on social media. 

Built in 1975, the Pearl Street property has hosted infrastructure for a range of telecom tenants. Sabey purchased the building in 2011 for $120M, officially rebranding it as Intergate.Manhattan. 

The building’s austere industrial appearance has been maligned since its construction. A New York Times columnist once compared efforts to improve the tower’s appearance to “turning a GE dishwasher into an office building.” Sabey made its own aesthetic changes during a 2016 renovation, replacing what had been solid limestone walls covering the top 15 floors with windows. But Buildworld’s study suggests this has done little to shift public opinion. 

In the U.S. as a whole, Sabey’s data center is ranked as the third-ugliest building behind Boston City Hall and the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. 

A Cat-astrophic Outage And Laser Cats In Space 

Data centers, particularly those serving federal agencies, have ramped up security against cyberthreats from both foreign governments and nonstate actors. But one government data center was no match for the threat posed by an employee’s cat.

A prolonged outage at a Department of Veterans Affairs data center in Kansas City, Missouri, was blamed on a cat jumping on a technician’s keyboard, The Register reported in September. The cat accidentally deleted an entire server cluster that the employee had been in the process of reconfiguring, leading to a four-hour shutdown at the Kansas City VA Medical Center. 

The incident was severe enough to be reported to the VA’s chief information officer, who told employees, “This is why I have a dog,” The Register reported.

While cats were causing problems for the VA, another government agency added some feline flare while testing a technology that could have significant implications for data centers. 

Earlier this month, NASA used a space-based laser to send a 15-second video of an orange tabby named Taters more than 19 million miles from the agency’s Psyche spacecraft to the California Institute of Technology's Palomar observatory near San Diego. Designers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made the video of Taters chasing a laser pointer to test the potential of using lasers to transmit broadband video and other data across vast distances. 

The ability to send large amounts of data by laser could have broad applications for the data center industry, where spaced-based data represents a growing market. The feasibility of space-based digital infrastructure has been limited largely by connectivity and latency problems, issues that laser data transmission could help mitigate.