The owner of a haunted house in Pennsylvania has a new idea to spook his patrons: the eerie whirring of fans, the humming of electricity, and the looming specter of an overhyped speculative bubble doomed to pop. That’s right, he wants to build an AI data center, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Derek Strine runs Pennhurst Asylum, a haunted house that lives inside the abandoned remains of a state-run medical institute. And while the property has been thoroughly monetized—hosting everything from historical tours and photography sessions to overnight “paranormal investigations” when not being used for a classic haunt in which the asylum is overrun by spooky actors (OooOOoohhh it’s a non-uuuuuunion joooobbbb)—the owner has apparently been possessed by the spirit of late-stage capitalism. Per Bloomberg, he has designs on making his 130 acres into the future home of a hyperscaler.
It’s not particularly difficult to imagine why Strine wants to make the shift. While converting a state hospital turned haunted asylum into a data center facility isn’t necessarily the most straightforward conversion in the world, the real estate developer likely realizes that land is at a premium, and managing a data center once it is stood up is probably less involved than handling staffing and live events. That said, the upstart costs aren’t exactly cheap. Bloomberg reported that Strine and his partners have already poured more than $16 million into the conversion project, and the first phase alone has been penciled in at $60 million to be spent on engineering and permitting costs alone. By contrast, Strine bought into the haunted house project for $3 million.
The project is also getting lots of pushback from the community, which doesn’t necessarily love the haunted house project in the first place—but they’d seemingly take that over the haunting presence of powering the always-watching eye of Big Tech like some Scooby-Doo-style paintings where the eyes follow you. They’ve described concerns about nearby residents having to deal with noise pollution and potential water shortages as their supply is siphoned off to cool the data center. Which, good call on their part: plenty of communities before them have found living next to a data center deeply unpleasant and potentially unhealthy.
What’s perhaps most notable about the haunted-house-to-data-center pipeline, though, is that it is a shining example of just how deep into the probably unsustainable depths of the AI lifecycle that we are. No knock on Strine, necessarily, but Bloomberg notes that he has no experience in building data centers. He just sees dollar signs. And he’s not alone. According to a recent survey from real estate service firm CBRE, 95% of real estate investors say they plan to increase their investments in data centers.
If there’s one way that Pennhurst Asylum is the perfect site for a planned data center, it’s this: most of these planned projects never come to fruition. According to data center consultancy company ASG, about 90% of announced data centers will never actually get built. They are ghost centers. Isn’t that fitting?
