Photo Credit: Gregory Varnum
One of my favorite things about the AI boom is that absolutely nothing is sacred anymore.
Got a warehouse? AI.
Got an empty office? AI.
Got an abandoned mall? AI.
Got an annoying ex? Somehow… also AI.
Got the Cow Palace: one of California's most iconic historic arenas that's hosted everyone from the Beatles to Martin Luther King Jr.? Believe it or not... AI.
According to a new proposal from Global Stack LLC, the Cow Palace could become home to one of the company's "edge" data centers, complete with a parking garage and a helicopter landing pad.
Why does it need a helipad? Because fuck you, that why.
At this point, AI executives look at historic landmarks the same way Bay Area landlords look at rent-controlled apartments: wasted potential.
The Cow Palace has spent the last 85 years building an identity. It has hosted rodeos, graduations, concerts, basketball games, political conventions, monster truck rallies and enough weird Bay Area events that you could probably reconstruct Northern California culture using nothing but old Cow Palace calendars.
But now we’re supposed to believe its highest calling is becoming a fucking hard drive?
That's the thing about AI hype. Every solution eventually starts looking suspiciously like the same solution.
Housing crisis?
AI.
Loneliness epidemic?
AI.
Economic inequality?
AI.
Historic public venue struggling financially?
Obviously the answer is... AI.
Inside of the Cow Palace during a seminar. Photo Credit: BrokenSphere
It's the technological equivalent of your uncle who thinks pouring Robitussin on a bullet wound will make it heal faster.
To be fair, Cow Palace officials aren't wrong for exploring new revenue. Running historic venues isn't cheap, and California hasn't exactly made it easy for public institutions to keep the lights on. The real tragedy is that we've created an economy where beloved public spaces have to audition for cloud computing companies just to survive.
It's the same story over and over again.
We refuse to adequately fund public institutions. They slowly fall apart. Then a private company shows up offering a lifeline that just so happens to permanently ruin the place. And then everyone else is forced to ask “what happened to the Bay?”
We sold it one lease agreement at a time.
The AI industry has somehow convinced us that every square foot of land needs to generate maximum computational value. It's no longer enough for a place to simply exist as a place where human beings gather. Every building now has to become infrastructure for machines.
There's something deeply depressing about that.
The Cow Palace wasn't built so chatbots could shave 40 milliseconds off your response time. It was built because people wanted somewhere to come together. That's a concept Silicon Valley increasingly struggles to understand because if people are gathering in real life, they're spending less time staring at screens.
Maybe that's why every solution keeps leading back to servers.
The saddest part isn't even the proposal itself.
It's how unsurprising it feels.
Ten years ago, if someone suggested putting a data center inside one of California's most historic public venues, everyone would've laughed them out of the room.
Now no one is in the room at all. They’re all at home. Alone. There’s also the water concerns, but the Bay’s full of water. That’s our thing. No biggie.
What could go wrong?
