Meanings
plural datacenters
- alternativeAlternative spelling of data centre.
If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.
2023 March 29, Eliezer Yudkowsky, “The Open Letter on AI Doesn't Go Far Enough”, in TIME, archived from the original on 02 Apr 2023
Origin
From data + center; as is generally true of English orthography for many compound nouns, the open compound was the original form and the solid compound gained acceptance over time. In the particular case of data center and datacenter, the 2020s were the decade when the solid variant went from IT-insider-jargon-only status to wide acceptance in general register.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
datacenter. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/datacenter
“datacenter.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/datacenter. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “datacenter,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/datacenter.
Source: datacenter on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.