A company that operates an immigration detention facility sees a business opportunity in temporary camps for the workers building AI data centers. The proposal exposes the physical geography behind supposedly weightless computation. Before a model answers from the cloud, construction crews pour concrete, install power systems, and assemble vast buildings in places that may not have enough housing. Their temporary rooms become another layer of infrastructure, positioned beside the servers but usually absent from the story of technological progress.

The language of the camp also carries a history. Modular accommodation can solve a genuine shortage, yet it can isolate workers, concentrate control in an employer or contractor, and leave little behind for the surrounding community once construction ends. The operator's detention business makes that continuity especially difficult to ignore: similar architecture can hold very different populations while preserving the same logic of managed, temporary bodies. AI expansion is often measured in chips, megawatts, and investment. Worker housing asks for another measure: the conditions under which the infrastructure is built. A data center's social footprint begins before the first server turns on, in the labor arrangements and provisional settlements assembled around its walls.