Data centres and what's next | Silicon · Ep 10

Last time, we filled a building with chips. So where does all this go next, and what's stopping it? The short answer is heat. Let's walk into one of those buildings, then look at the industry's tricks for keeping going: light from exploding tin, chips cut into pieces, new materials, and wires made of light. Episode 10 of Silicon from Aussie Science Clips: How a handful of wrong atoms in purified sand became the transistor, the chip, and the data centre. Full transcript, sources and every episode: https://aussiescience.com/silicon/dat... CHAPTERS 0:00 The question 0:23 Inside the building 0:50 How much electricity? 1:27 A heater that computes 2:03 The free lunch 2:30 Off isn't quite off 3:08 The power wall 3:47 Still shrinking 4:09 Shooting tin 4:40 Mirrors in a vacuum 5:17 One company 5:41 Three nanometres of what? 6:08 Wrapping the gate 6:41 Why break a chip into pieces? 7:11 Mix and match 7:37 Wider gaps 8:16 Chargers and cars 8:35 Wires are hot too 9:12 Wires of light 9:58 What the roadmaps say 10:36 From a warm crystal 11:21 What should we explain next? SOURCES 1. IBM Think, "What is a data center?" — https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/data... 2. IEA, Energy and AI (10 April 2025), Executive summary — https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-an... 3. IEA news, "Data centre electricity use surged in 2025, even with tightening… — https://www.iea.org/news/data-centre-... 4. IEA, Energy and AI (10 April 2025), "Energy demand from AI" — https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-an... 5. Uptime Institute, Global Data Center Survey 2025 (Report 180, July 2025) — https://datacenter.uptimeinstitute.co... 6. NVIDIA Technical Blog, A. Elmeleegy, "NVIDIA Contributes NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 Designs to… — https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvi... 7. M. Bohr, "A 30 Year Retrospective on Dennard's MOSFET Scaling Paper", IEEE SSCS News… — https://sscs.ieee.org/images/files/ne... 8. R. H. Dennard et al., "Design of Ion-Implanted MOSFET's with Very Small Physical… — https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~agrawvd/C... 9. S.-W. Jun, UC Irvine CS 250B (Spring 2022), lecture 1 "End of Scaling" (Dennard ended… — https://www.ics.uci.edu/~swjun/course... 10. C. C. Hu, *Modern Semiconductor Devices for Integrated Circuits*, ch. 7 "MOSFETs in… — https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/wp-conte... 11. H. Esmaeilzadeh et al., "Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling", ISCA 2011 — https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~markhill/r... 12. Reuters via NBC News, "Intel scraps new desktop, server chips" (7 May 2004) — https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4923373 13. The Register, "Intel decides speed matters less these days, kills 4GHz Pentium" (14… — https://www.theregister.com/2004/10/1... 14. K. Rupp, "42 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data" (15 Feb 2018) and data repository (CC… — https://www.karlrupp.net/2018/02/42-y... 15. ASML, "Light & lasers – Lithography principles" — https://www.asml.com/en/technology/li... 16. ASML, "EUV lithography systems" — https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-... 17. ASML, "The hottest thing about our machines" — https://www.asml.com/en/discover/hot-... 18. ZEISS SMT, "EUV lithography" — https://www.zeiss.com/semiconductor-m... 19. J. Wilson, Introduction to Physical Electronics (LibreTexts), §1.12 "Light Emitting… — https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelve... 20. NIST Physical Measurement Laboratory, *Handbook of Basic Atomic Spectroscopic Data*,… — https://physics.nist.gov/PhysRefData/... …full list of all 58 sources in the pinned comment. HOW THIS WAS MADE Researched and scripted with AI assistance, then fact-checked claim by claim against the sources above by a separate AI pass. Narration is two synthetic Inworld voices. Diagrams are drawn in code (Manim); atmospheric images and a few video shots are AI-generated (FLUX, Seedance via Replicate) and are illustrations, not footage. No real person is depicted. Spotted an error? Tell us in the comments and we'll correct it.