A blank rectangle of the building is next to the highway, facing the endless Wyoming Prairie. It depicts a greenish-gray brown that Disneyland's Imagineers use for things they don't notice. However, nine semi-trailer-sized green boxes surrounded by the long sides of the building like nursing puppies are a prize. They are huge heat exchangers intended to cool the stack of black pizza box-shaped computers inside, squeezing electrons through silicon, making everything from video to cryptocurrency.
This data center is one of several in Cheyenne. These bustling circuitry hives run the modern digital economy and manage the unprecedented amount of data and calculations required by artificial intelligence.
Tech companies are competing to dominate a speculative future built on AI. Alphabet, a parent of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google, says it will spend at least $320 billion on facilities and equipment for AI.
Over the course of months, a team of Business Insider reporters and editors have delved deep into this national infrastructure project. We looked at a chunk of permits to build these facilities to create a comprehensive national list of data centers. We learned how much water and electricity these places use, or what water and electricity are expected, and the consequences of people's daily life.
Business Insider identified 1,240 US data centers that were already built or approved for construction late last year. This is the most comprehensive tally to date. This is almost four times the number in 2010. These hundreds are “hyperschools” that rotate primarily to power AI.
High-tech companies envision a world in which AI algorithms replace doctors, make mysteriously accurate disaster predictions, come up with theories that change the universe, act as personal assistants, teach or provide children. Dating.
“You need to have the ability to create, right?” says Courtney Thompson, chief information officer and co-founder of Lunavi, which owns the Cheyenne data center. “Whether it's on someone else's platform or whether it's your own infrastructure, you need to make those resources available to create and innovate.”
That's a possible advantage. Our analysis of Business Insider reveals the downsides that are the costs we are currently paying.
We found that four of the 10 data centers in the US are located in places that are seriously short of water (or are set up). Some of these facilities are allowed to guzzle millions of gallons a day.
Collectively, business insider estimates that US data centers could consume more electricity than Poland, which has a population of 36.6 million in use in 2023.
According to Business Insider's estimates, the required power plants will release enough pollution to release enough pollution, causing public health costs of between $5.7 billion and $9.2 billion a year.
Taxpayers are subsidizing much of this boom. Because local governments are fighting for projects that hope to remake their town into a high-tech hub with high-paying jobs. Business Insider has discovered that many cities in places like central Ohio are expanding their tax ranges to tech giants, which have over $1 million over the years for each job.
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Industry representatives say they are working to reduce or offset shortcomings – invest billions of dollars a year in green energy infrastructure, pay to recover water sources, and build more efficient technologies. They point out that they are meeting the demand from consumers and businesses for technologies that can change not only apps and devices but also society itself. They believe resource investment is valuable.
In any case, your invoice is due.
Secret Cost
Virginia is full of data centers today. Of these, 329 handle a third of the Earth's internet traffic and consume almost a quarter of the state's electricity in 2023. Regulating land use in the United States is usually a local issue, so data center construction is usually mediated between personal flights of cross-border technology oligopolies, representatives in expensive suits, and Dave of the local planning committee.
As an indirect result of that biased relationship, the amount of electricity and water used by these data centers has previously been effectively secretive.
Amazon Data Center in Loudon County, Virginia – one of 329 facilities built or planned in Virginia. Greg Khan for BI
The data center draws power from the local utility grid. But they have to run 24/7, so if that power goes out, they rely on backup generators that burn diesel fuel or natural gas. To do so, the data center owner must obtain permission. This requires accurate accounting of emissions. That output maps to the power needs of the data center. By obtaining 1,240 permits from across the US, Business Insider calculated the potential short-term ecological footprint of all US data center owners based on estimates of the amount of power data centers they normally use compared to the capacity of their backup systems. (For more information about Business Insider methodology, see here.)
Amazon is above the list. Business Insider estimates show that building all your planned data centers will use between 30 and 48 terawatt hours a year. At the mid-point, it will be roughly the same electricity as Nevada used in 2023.
An Amazon spokesperson said Business Insider's methodology for estimating consumption is “based on assumptions that “oversimplify the operation of complex data centers and do not explain the important differences in how companies build and operate data centers.”
Google and Meta did not respond to Business Insider's questions about data center power usage, and QTS declined to comment. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that the data center “doesn't always run at 100% of the installed capacity.”
The federal government estimates that electricity demand will increase more than it has been in the last decade since the 1980s. According to some calculations, data centers account for 44% of their growth. Meeting that new demand means maintaining the capabilities of an older, dirty generation online. The climate crisis and carbon commitments will be damned.
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Water is the most effective way to cool hotter, more closely packed graphics processing units that AI relies on. And the water must often be fresh. Data centers are cumbersome drinkers.
In 2018, before the AI boom, US data centers consumed 34 billion gallons a year. It is used daily by California. Just seven years later, the US doubled the capacity of its data centers.
Now, this is where you expect stories like this to communicate how much water a data center of a certain size uses. That's almost impossible. A small portion of all data center operators track water usage and fluctuates dramatically depending on size and technology.
A natural gas plant operated by Dominion Energy in Virginia. Data centers require a huge amount of electricity. Greg Khan for BI
Thanks to the AIR permissions considered by Business Insider, we can at least tell you where those data centers are. That's important. Because given their needs, companies might think they will place them near a ready supply of fresh water. They often aren't.
In fact, 40% of US data centers are located (or set up) in places marked by the World Resources Institute (sustainability advocacy group) with high or extremely high water shortages. This includes multiple parts of the arid US southwest, such as Maricopa County, Arizona, a “very water-stressed area” with 48 data centers.
Datacenter builders know all this and they take the water seriously. The largest water users pledge to be water-neutral in the coming years, paying less use to others or funding water conservation projects as offset. And they point out that just because they have permission to use millions of gallons of water a day doesn't mean they do so, and when there is a shortage of water, they tend to support air-cooling technology instead.
Of course, air cooling requires electricity. And even if they drew it, the power needs of data centers are large enough and tend to raise local electricity prices for everyone, business insiders have discovered whether it's at home or at Walmart.
Their punishing noisy cooling fans run all night. All of the moisture sent to the data center may have been home or be able to use different industries or agriculture. Also, spills from cooling systems risk contaminating local waterways.
Future calculations
Technical improvements could one day remove this. A more efficient heat exchanger may solve the cooling problem. A more flexible power grid or AI that uses much less energy can solve the power problem.
Power lines in Maricopa County, Arizona. The utility plans to invest billions and upgrade its electrical grids to spike power demand in data centers. Jesse Rieser from BI
Some utilities offer new fossil fuel plants online, but renewable solutions are emerging. A few miles from Cheyenne's data center, a massive solar farm is rising along with hundreds of wind turbines already spinning.
You can be amazed at new applications such as real-time language translation and more accurate cancer diagnosis. We can scramble the hallucinations of the latest chatbots. Or, in data centers derived by algorithms rather than the White House or the Pentagon, you can worry about policies and military decisions made in data centers that are little understood. This all happens when the aquifer drainage and electricity bills climb.
A handful of cross-border businesses offer this proposition. They enter an age of technical wonder in exchange for the opportunity to earn huge sums. The state is that the state gives them more money and reorients the entire regulatory structure and lets them do it. If the AI revolution offers, it will likely balance the ledger. Otherwise, you will be left with future receipts that did not arrive.
