How many dat centres do we need
The short version: A UK-based mass-surveillance channel questions the explosive growth of data centers, a buildout that quietly powers the ALPR networks we track every day.
Our Take
Credit to the creator behind Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency for asking a question most coverage skips entirely: how many data centers does a society actually need, and who benefits from building them at this pace? The video is part of a broader body of work questioning digital ID, CBDCs, and surveillance infrastructure in the UK and US, and this entry zeroes in on the physical backbone that makes all of it possible — the server farms storing and processing the data trail we all leave behind.
That question lands close to home for anyone watching Flock Safety's expansion. Every ALPR camera bolted to a pole is a sensor, but the real story is what happens after the photo is taken: it gets uploaded, stored, cross-referenced, and shared across a growing network of government and private databases. None of that happens without server capacity, and the industry's appetite for more compute, more storage, and more 'AI-enhanced' analytics is a quiet driver of why these camera networks keep scaling up with so little public debate about retention limits or access controls.
We'd push the conversation one step further: it's not just how many data centers we need, it's who controls what's inside them and for how long. If you want to see how much of this infrastructure has already landed in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment locally, our take-action page has concrete steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.