Your Town Got the Data Center. It Never Got a Say.

It depends on where it is and how it's cooled. A large one can use as much water as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. This can become a problem depending on where companies choose to build. About 2 in 3 new AI data centers went into counties already short on water. The Dalles, Oregon is one of them – a dry stretch of the state that's been under drought declarations twice since 2020. Google's data centers there used more than a quarter of the city's water supply, nearly triple what they drew four years earlier. And Google funded a 13-month court fight to keep those numbers from the public.

No. That figure comes from worst-case estimates, and real water use varies a lot from one data center to the next – often it's far lower. Unfortunately, a lot of what goes around online about AI and water is overstated. For scale: America's farms consume more water by lunchtime on a single day than every US data center consumes in a year of cooling (USGS; national lab data). Count the water used by the power plants that run them, and it's still about three days' worth.

But while the overall usage isn't as significant as it's sometimes made out to be, the issue is local: companies often build water-hungry facilities in dry counties, in private, without the people who live there getting a vote.

Globally, they use about 1.5% of the world's electricity – a real and growing share. But it's smaller than you may have heard, and far below industries like agriculture or transportation. The serious harms are local: diesel generators and gas turbines polluting the air next door, a hum that never stops, water drawn from dry basins, and higher electric bills. Those harms land on specific towns – usually towns that never got a say.33

More than 3,000 data centers operate in the US today, and more than 1,500 are in development. In the biggest markets, capacity equal to nearly two-thirds of everything ever built is under construction right now. The four biggest tech companies plan to spend over $600 billion this year, most of it on AI infrastructure.13344

Yes, in places with a lot of them. When demand jumps, utilities build more grid infrastructure and pass the cost to everyone who pays a bill. Virginia's $16-a-month increase is the documented example.6

They're real – measured, documented, and now in court. Cooling fans and chillers run around the clock, and they spin harder in cold weather. That's why neighbors describe a hum that's worst at night. Fixes exist – setbacks, sound barriers, quieter cooling. Companies skip them when no one requires them.

Fewer than the sales pitch says. Construction jobs are real but temporary. Even the largest data centers employ fewer than 150 permanent workers – about the staff of one supermarket.

Sometimes. Towns have used zoning rules, recalls, and ballot measures to block or slow data centers. In Indianapolis, residents organized for months against a Google data center – and Google withdrew before the vote. But companies usually negotiate in private and announce when it's done. That's why we're asking for a real say up front, not a fight after the fact.