by Susie Hairston

It is pretty much impossible if you at all pay attention to the world around you, not to be aware of the huge pushback against data centers that is happening in the United States. More than 70% of Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their communities, and in response, state and local officials are starting to rethink the tax breaks these centers usually get and develop policies to protect water and energy supplies for local communities and ensure they do not pay increased energy and water costs as a result of these centers. For example, Governor Greg Abbot recently suggested that data centers must pay for all necessary electric infrastructure needs and told ERCOT, which manages the flow of about 90% of Texas’s electric load, and PUCT, which oversees water, telephone, and electric utilities in the state, to focus on protecting Texans and their resources when making decision about data centers’ requests for electricity and water.

Texas is already home to nearly 400 data centers, with hundreds more under construction and proposed. Local environmental organizations have had many webinars on water and energy use by data centers and are working on policy positions to ensure these centers  are not a burden on the environment or on surrounding communities. The controversy over data centers is complicated and would take a a lot more than a short article to cover in all of its subtleties; this article is a broad overview of the issues and some of the suggested solutions. Please refer to the references or some of the organizations listed at the end for a deeper dive into each issue.

Issues:

• Water
  • Depletion in areas where water is already a problem – draining of aquifers and rivers and lakes in order to provide cooling for the data centers and to cool the power sources necessary to run these data centers;  Based on 2025 projections and other data, Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) estimates data center water use could grow from 25 billion gallons per year to up to 161 billion, depending on how many centers are built and what electricity and cooling technologies are used, potentially representing up to 2.7% of the state’s total water use. “Large data centers can guzzle up to 5 million gallons of water daily, which is equivalent to the daily usage of a town with about 10,000 to 50,000 residents,” according to a study on the Environmental and Energy Study Institute’s website. A University of Georgia report explains, “Unfortunately, a vast majority of data centers are simply hooked up to the local water mains, meaning most data centers’ cooling water comes from potable (drinking-quality) sources like treated municipal water or groundwater. One analysis estimated that around 57% of all data centers use water from potable water supplies.. It is also estimated that 80% to 90% of this water is consumed from watersheds—such as lakes, rivers, or aquifers—often the same sources providing drinking water through public water systems.” 
  • Water pollution – Most data centers use evaporative cooling. The water used has naturally occurring minerals and salts as well as chemicals from municipal water, metals that have leached from the facility’s pipes, and PFAS and other chemicals added to stop microbial growth and corrosion. When the water evaporates during cooling, these contaminants are concentrated and eventually flushed out of the facility where they can disrupt aquatic ecosystems and contaminate groundwater. The water that is released from data centers is also hot and can stress fish and other aquatic life and cause algal blooms.
• Energy demand —  A Texas Tribune article on an East Texas residents concerned about data centers coming to their community reported, “In the last two years, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas said 519 companies have asked to connect to the system. That would increase power demand by 438,595 megawatts — or, roughly, one-third of the power generation in America. These types of requests have been followed by rate increases across the rest of the country.” Margaret Cook of HARC pointed out that “A single site can consume as much electricity as an entire town.”
• Citizens paying the cost of the excessive usage of water and energy  – Tax breaks have been given to the data centers, taking money out of the communities where they are cited: in Texas, for example, data centers are exempted from the sales tax, though Governor Abbot and some Texas legislators are currently rethinking that; additionally the excessive use of water and energy by these data centers is creating a need for new infrastructure, the cost of which,  if carefully crafted policies are not put in place, will fall on the communities and not the data centers.
• Noise and air pollution – HVAC systems that are regularly used to keep data centers cool create noise pollution 24/7. A Texas Tribune article on data center backlash in East Texas reported, “Residents living near data centers have compared the noise to the sounds of an airplane engine, a freight train, a huge leaf blower, or a helicopter,” and  a New York TImes article on noise pollution and data centers described, “The humming of those cooling systems, the rumbling of the generators and the whirring of fans can be heard, and felt, for hundreds of feet and even up to a mile away. Some of the noise consists of infrasound, ultra-low frequency sound waves that fall below the threshold of human hearing. Instead of audibly hearing these extremely low frequencies, people physically feel them as pressure fluctuations; some residents who live near data centers say a constant low-frequency vibration is ruining their health and homes.” The Texas Tribune article adds, “In many ways the air and noise pollution caused by data centers is similar to the pollution caused by highways, and there is ample research to show the potential impacts of this pollution on community well-being. Air pollution from living near highways is associated with poor lung health, potentially fatal heart problems, and increased mortality. Constant noise pollution is associated with development of type 2 diabetes, heart problems, declines in fitness, increased stress and blood pressure, and poor sleep and impaired cognitive performance.” 
• Environmental Justice concerns  – People of color and low-income renters are more likely to live in areas with higher rates of air, water, and noise pollution. Adding data centers to these communities inequitably increases the threat to their health.
• Land – The monstrous complexes that are large data centers are changing the character of urban, suburban,  and rural communities.
• Lack of data availability makes it difficult to understand what the long-term concerns about data centers might be or to mitigate any problems in advance.  Data center companies, who are not currently required by law to provide actual and projected water use data to the state, were asked to provide that information to the Texas Water Development Board and the Public Utility Commission so these agencies could understand the magnitude of the need and come up with a plan to address it, but only one third of the companies responded.
• Lack of transparency — In many cases, local municipalities are not informing residents or including them in discussions when they agree to let a data center company build in their community. Additionally, Texas does not keep a data base of where data centers already exist or where they are being proposed or under construction, resulting in residents being excluded from the decision-making process.
• Lack of long-term jobs –though data centers may provide a few immediate construction jobs, they provide very few long-term jobs in the communities in which they are built, and some fear that their use for AI is cutting other jobs elsewhere. Though there have been some layoffs related to replacing human workers with AI agents, it is still early to tell the ramifications of AI for jobs. Some argue that it will not affect jobs and others argue that it will cause the loss of some 30% of jobs. Some companies are claiming that AI is the reason for many layoffs, though economists are suggesting that is just a good excuse to cover for other reasons companies have laid workers off.
• People’s concern about data centers is a manifestation of their concerns about AI. People are worrying what AI means for jobs, for privacy, for democracy, for humanity. This is a huge topic, and there is not enough space to delve into it here.