Billion Worlds Lab

In recent years, the exponential growth of data-intensive technologies has required a rapid expansion of data centers, particularly in Virginia, which is considered the world’s largest data center market. This information-technology infrastructure requires a tremendous amount of critical resources, water, and energy consumption for running and cooling servers.

With increasing interest in data-intensive technologies like large-language models, predictive analytics, algorithmic modeling, cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence, there is a need to address the ethics associated with the rise in these data-intensive technologies; simply put – is society’s use of data socially desirable, or do our data systems reproduce and intensify systems of inequity and exclusion?

Data Ecologies explores the social and environmental consequences (energy usage, electronic and toxic waste, water consumption, land use, greenhouse gas emissions), energetic costs, and opportunities for energy efficiency innovations relating to data-enabled technologies and the data centers that support them. Initial funding for this work comes from VCU’s Institute for Sustainable Energy and Environment.

Our collaborators in this work also include the Environmental Humanities Lab and the AI Futures Lab, both at VCU’s Humanities Research Center.

Faculty Investigators:
Radhika Barua (Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering), Alberto Cano (Computer Science), Jesse Goldstein (Sociology), Damian Pitt (Urban and Regional Studies and Planning), Jennifer Rhee (English), Ivan Suen (Urban and Regional Studies and Planning)