A multi-billion-dollar data center campus development underway in Grayslake, known as T5 @ Chicago IV, has made big promises for the area, but one Chicago artificial intelligence expert questions whether it and similar projects across the country are building toward the wrong future.

Data centers are facilities that house physical equipment, such as servers and other kinds of computers, to store digital data and provide computation power. They’re for the basic computing, processing and storing of “anything and everything related to the internet,” as Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, put it.

Diorio said there has been a construction boom in recent years, with the seasonally adjusted annual rate of construction spending jumping from $19.5 billion in

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