If you are reading this post, you are using a Data Center somewhere.
If you are asking people to join your Facebook page, sign up for your Zoom, and contribute to your GoFundMe to oppose Data Centers, you may be unclear on the concept.
If you block a data center in one town, another will be built in another town nearby, or in the next state, or in Tierra del Fuego, or under the Ocean, or in Outer space – because you and billions of people like you, as well as, increasingly, any business that wants to stay competitive, are using and demanding them.
Everyone should be deeply concerned about the uses and misuse of AI technology, and every industrial facility should be held to rigorous economic and environmental standards. But I am disgusted by politicians on all sides who seek to enflame people’s often misinformed and untethered anger toward billionaire oligarchs, and legit fears about the technology, without actually educating them and leading a way forward.
There are bad faith actors out there who seek to equate Data Centers with Clean energy, and are looking for ways to mobilize justified concerns about AI as a cudgel for the fossil fuel industry.
I’ll be pushing back.
Adam Mastroianni in the New York Times:
I empathize with the environmental opposition to data center construction, but the arguments are shakier than they seem. The battle over where A.I. data centers are being built is really a battle over what role A.I. should play in our lives. And that’s a battle that critics can win.
Many people feel that A.I. is being foisted on them by a handful of tech billionaires, in ways that are incorporeal and difficult to resist. Data centers, on the other hand, are physical structures that are subject to zoning regulations. So it makes sense that anger toward and anxiety about A.I. are manifesting as opposition to the buildings that house it. Regular people can’t tell Sam Altman what to do, but they can kick him out of their towns.
Data centers should be held to the same environmental standards as any other project. However, according to the researcher Andy Masley, giving up a lifetime of interacting with large language models would make a negligible difference in emissions compared with avoiding one trans-Atlantic flight or switching to a hybrid car. By his estimates, sending a prompt to ChatGPT is about as carbon-intensive as running a clothes dryer for a single second.
Communities have long tolerated wasteful projects that take up tons of space, consume lots of natural resources and serve the whims of wealthier people. They’re called golf courses and backyards. The 14,000 golf courses across the United States used nearly 550 billion gallons of water in 2020, and the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that Americans use over three trillion gallons of water on “landscape irrigation” each year. No one knows for sure how much water data centers use in total. One reasonable estimate from Brian Potter at the Institute for Progress put it at about 100 billion gallons in 2023. Even if the number of data centers increases tenfold, we may still end up using less water on artificial intelligence than we use to keep our grass springy.
Everybody deserves a say in the future of A.I. We don’t have to resort to NIMBYism and questionable environmental arguments to get it. Even if one community succeeds in keeping the data centers out, another community — probably a poorer and more desperate one — will let them in.
Nationally, golf courses use more water than data centers.
The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America estimates golf courses use about 2.08 billion gallons of water per day for irrigation, compared with an estimated 449 million gallons per day used by U.S. data centers for cooling, according to the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association.
However, water consumption varies widely among individual facilities and regions.
How much water do data centers use?
Water use varies widely depending on a data center’s size, location and cooling system.
According to a 2026 report from the Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association, a medium-sized data center may use about 100 million gallons of water annually, while large hyperscale facilities can consume between 1 million and 5 million gallons per day during peak conditions.
Most of that water is used to cool servers via evaporative cooling systems, which are more energy-efficient than air cooling but consume significantly more water.
Some newer facilities are reducing freshwater use by adopting closed-loop cooling systems or using reclaimed wastewater instead of drinking water.
I totally understand all of that, however I do appreciate that that opposition to data centers is resulting in much less opposition to housing projects, at least in my community, which is a pretty big win as far as I’m concerned.
every data center must use renewable energy. not burn nat gas or diesel..if you want to avoid catastrophic climate impacts.