Weighing the costs and benefits of the data center construction boom
What do text messages, video games, YouTube Shorts, and Google searches have in common? They all go through data centers.
Over the past several years, the United States has experienced a boom in the construction of data centers, largely driven by increased demand for artificial intelligence. While old data centers used to be clustered around Silicon Valley, northern Virginia has now become the new data center capital of the world. Home to 563 data centers, Northern Virginia has become a battleground between big tech companies and suburban communities. Data centers threaten residents and the local environment, but the harms are largely ignored due to the general assumption that they spur economic growth.
Proponents of data center construction like to paste the words “positive economic benefits” into their arguments for new construction. Companies that build centers, like Meta and Google, often pay disproportionately high taxes back to the counties they build in, which provide significantly more funding and services to county residents. In Virginia’s Loudoun County, which accounts for almost all of Virginia’s 563 data centers, public schools are ranked 4th state-wide, and host an ultra-competitive academic environment. Loudoun County also has the highest median household income in the nation, hovering at around $150,000—the result of a dramatic increase over the past few decades since the construction of data centers. However, these statistics do not tell the whole story of the data center boom. Outside of stellar schools, residents do not directly benefit from the construction. Data centers only require around 160 full-time employees, so the vast majority of residents do not find better jobs in new centers. Most high-paying jobs at these data centers are offered to already-employed tech workers moving into the state.
Additionally, residents have expressed that the environmental impact of data centers outweighs the benefits. Data centers require a staggering amount of energy to power servers and water for cooling. The cluster of new centers accounts for 40% of electricity usage in Virginia and use enough energy to power three New York Cities. This obscene amount of power in use strains local grids and accounts for high carbon dioxide emissions. Hundreds of miles of power lines supplying electricity to data centers have turned Loudoun County’s once-scenic areas into eyesores. The unpleasant scenery has decreased property values as a result. Even with a nationwide push towards renewable energy, the sudden rise in new data centers will dramatically increase energy demand to a point where renewable energy will not be able to keep up. Data centers also use around 5 million gallons of water every day, enough water to supply a town of 50,000 people for one day. Most of this water is often evaporated into the air, rather than reused. With hundreds of data centers planned for construction in the arid Southwest, the water consumed will burden a region already consuming large amounts of water in its cities and farms. The balance between environmental sustainability and technological progress is being fought in Northern Virginia. With plans to build hundreds of centers in the Southwest, Atlanta metro area, and Texas, tech companies will only continue to antagonize local populations and environments under the guise of economic and technological development. Clear regulations and laws are needed in the future to provide sustainable guidelines for future data center construction. Without legislation, this conflict will only worsen in the future. As modern life shifts online, tech companies expand, and climate change worsens. Perhaps the answer to this issue does not lie in more technology and progress, but rather less.
