As companies pour billions into sprawling industrial campuses for cloud and AI computing, some data center operators are experimenting with four-legged bots — about the size of large dogs — that can patrol fences, inspect equipment, and flag any issues before they turn into costly outages.
“I was literally at a data center this week,” Merry Frayne, senior director of product management at Boston Dynamics, the maker of Spot, told Business Insider. “We’ve seen a huge, huge uptick in interest from data centers in the last year, I’d say, which is probably not surprising given the investment in that space.”
Robot dogs have already been deployed by first responders, the military, and in other industrial sectors such as oil and mining. But the rapid pace of data center buildouts is creating another niche for the mechanical quadrupeds.
