Dorothy

The communities pushing back aren’t doing so on aesthetic grounds alone. Their grievances are concrete: surging local electricity demand, water consumption at industrial scale, noise, strained infrastructure, and generous tax breaks that shift the cost of all of the above onto residents. Opposition has proven to be strikingly bipartisan — a recent Gallup survey found 71% of Americans would oppose a data center in their community, a higher disapproval rate than for nuclear plants or gas facilities. Milwaukee-based comedian Charlie Berens shot a one-liner at a recent town hall: “the most bipartisan issue since beer.”

Moratoriums won’t stop the build Sixty-nine U.S. jurisdictions have enacted moratoriums on data center construction, but Park cautioned that bans simply redistribute development. “The folks developing these sites, they kind of don’t care,” he said. “If you want to shut us down here, we’re gonna go somewhere else.” The economics, he adds, backs up the push: the value compute generates from electricity can be 20 to 100 times the cost of the power itself.

People don’t generally like the idea of artificial intelligence systems powering predatory pricing schemes, ruining the education system, and creating a panopticon — and data centers are the engines of those dystopias.

That’s on top of concerns that data centers are guzzling water as part of their cooling systems. Two data center developments, one in Arizona and one in Georgia, took public water without authorization, and a recent study by the Houston Advanced Research Center projected the centers would drain as much as 399 billion gallons of water in Texas alone by 2030.

“Local utility firms will be earning a huge amount of money from these centers, which they can use to improve their infrastructure without adding to consumer bills,” he said. “Better design techniques using LED lighting, insulation, windows, and other materials are designed to stabilize data center electricity usage.”

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