Our one-hour drive from Buffalo, New York, to the 750MW TeraWulf artificial intelligence (AI) factory on the shores of Lake Ontario starts in a landscape defined by the heavy, silent remnants of former industrial glories.
Here, between the grey expanses of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, are the skeletal remnants of 20th century blue-collar dominance – railroad tracks, derelict grain elevators and blackened red-brick factories that were once part of a huge flow of steel, coal and auto production between the Midwest and the Atlantic coast.
The city centre itself is tidy enough, but with a hint of ghost town – elevated flyovers snake above deserted streets, while the southern downtown periphery is dominated by vast, empty car parks built around sports stadia. You get the feeling the city centre has become more of a destination than a persistent community.
Architectural gems – the Art Deco grandeur of Frank Lloyd Wright’s City Hall, the soaring facade of the Rand Building, the hollowed-out expanse of the former rail terminal – stand as grand, stone monuments to an era of manual labour and the professional culture that was once constructed on top of it.
Leaving the rust belt city behind
Heading east along Route 90, urban density gradually thins to the suburban fringe, where industrial units line the roadside behind narrow service lanes. Beyond that, houses are now separated by wide, manicured lawns and what appears as a highly curated patina of rural Americana. Whiteboard houses with front stoops and fruit cellars dot the historic apple-growing regions near the lake shore.
Finally, we are at the heavily secured perimeter of the site. A gatehouse with high fences of barbed wire and an on-board passport check that reminds this author of a tense bus crossing into Yugoslavia in 1985.
Inside the fence line, the horizon is dominated by the buff-painted, surprisingly pristine carcass of the decommissioned Somerset power station. Beside it rises an unnatural-looking hill which turns out to be a grassed-over heap of compacted ash that now forms the highest geographic point in the county.
Where eagles dare
The old generation plant looms over the lake, and eagles circle overhead in the cold air. From its side, a giant, rust-coloured rectiform duct emerges. Its purpose is unfathomable; perhaps a fire-carrying intestine, herniated from an otherwise comprehensible body. It is wreathed in an impossible tracery of girders and steelwork and re-enters the building high above.
In front of this brooding bulk, gargantuan yet spindly and angular transformer frames sit empty, waiting for massive cables to bridge the gap between the vanished coal era and the digital factory. Of the hundreds who once ran the old furnaces that created steam plumes visible from space, only a sparse handful of 10 or 20 workers remain.
The current 180-acre construction site is a furious, chaotic anthill. Along the rough dirt tracks, a constant procession of all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), telescopic loaders, mud-splattered pickups, semi-trailers and concrete mixers churn the earth.
Everywhere is a sea of high-vis vests and scratched hard hats, with an equal assortment of sweat-stained hoodies and caps beneath them. The workforce is entirely male – thick beards, wrap-around sunglasses and prominent bellies de rigeur among the older guys. Meanwhile, the pale, late-night tired faces of younger workers peer from beneath a helmet-and-hoodie combo. Baggy jeans and stiff canvas workwear, coated in a fine layer of grey concrete dust, are the uniform for all.
Plumbing for AI
Within the rising steel skeletons of the five new buildings, a dense labyrinth of industrial plumbing grows. Galvanised ducting, cable trays and complex routings cross overhead. Pipework ranges from inch-wide to feet across. It is high-end, highly engineered piping, with equally well-made clamping – no rough groundwork tubing here – all designed to direct immense but precise hydraulic flows between graphics processing unit (GPU) chip cooling and towering Evapco cooling units outside. These contain enormous circulating fans that pull air past car radiator-like heat exchangers to expel the heat of the silicon into the sky.
In a nearby hall – a former cryptocurrency mining shed now repurposed as a workers’ lunch room – the evidence of technological obsolescence hangs overhead. Inch-thick cables, severed and useless, dangle from suspended trays like dead nerves, while beneath them, multi-coloured strands poke up from openings in the concrete floor like broken sticks of rock.
While all on the surface appears smooth-running – and there’s nothing to doubt it is – the primary workflow bottleneck sits with the electricians. Threading 350 miles of heavy cabling through these steel shells is a slow, gruelling struggle of human fingers against a rigid digital blueprint. Inside the datacentre halls in various states of construction, men balance against high cable trays, stand in careful study of rack power bars, or kneel in the dirt to make copper connections.
Work never stops, and shift changes bring two distinct armies of 1,600 men. There’s never-ending movement as shifts come on, or workers move between locations, and trucks and ATVs clatter through the mud under the silent gaze of the eagles.
Between the rising structures, rows of portakabins sit in the grey mud, their windows revealing hard-hatted, high-vis-wearing engineers poring over blueprints. Portakabins are flanked by long lines of portaloos where basic human functions and the final checks of construction paperwork are carried out in the dark, sometimes accompanied by the distant, rhythmic thump of pile drivers breaking more ground.
