Streaming shows, storing photos in the cloud and using social media — all of these require data centers. Why are they so controversial in the communities where tech companies want to build them?
Port Washington residents want to recall the city’s mayor over a $15 billion Oracle campus that is under construction. Microsoft is building a data center in Mount Pleasant.
Some data centers require millions of gallons of water to operate each year. The energy demand for a data center can equal as much power consumption as a town.
To learn more about data centers, WUWM reporter Eddie Morales spoke with Costa Samaras, the director of the Scott Institute for Energy Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He also led clean energy innovation for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden administration.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eddie Morales: What are data centers?
Costa Samaras: The way that we think of data centers are, these are the factories that run the internet. They are physical buildings. They're filled with computers — not the type of computers that we might have at our desks — but really industrial-scale computers that store data and run everything from our email to the YouTube videos that we watch to computations for companies and universities in the region.
From an energy perspective, we normally think of them less like an office building and more like a steel mill or a refinery or a bigger factory or even tens of thousands of homes. Data centers, just like the internet, rarely turn off. They're running around the clock. Their electricity use can ramp up and down. So when we talk about data centers, we're really talking about a new type of heavy industry. It's just more digital.
What's a rough timeline of them?
In the last decade, the internet use grew a lot, both in the United States and around the world. But the electricity from data centers did not grow nearly as much. That is because of efficiency inside of the data center. Then sometime around 2019, the ability for artificial intelligence to do advanced computations, to do advanced coding, to understand and classify what types of images it was seeing really started to take off.
The AI boom over the last five or six years really started to accelerate when AI became much more integrated and valuable to companies, to other industries. It really transformed data centers from a regional story about the internet to a national story about energy, infrastructure, and communities.
Why have data centers been in the news so much?
As the dramatic increase of computing has grown, it has required the construction of new data centers. Data centers are the main energy story that's happening right now. That's because computers use electricity and data centers are full of computers. So when we think about maybe our laptop or our desktop, you can hear that fan running sometimes when it's working.
In a data center, there are hundreds or thousands of machines that are doing computations for artificial intelligence or for other parts of the internet that are consuming electricity to run, but also consuming electricity to stay cool because the use of computing inside of a data center generates heat and you got to get rid of that heat somehow.
So data centers are in the news because these are factory-size industrial electricity demands that can show up to a community and be built in a really rapid time frame. It raises big questions around electricity grid capacity and electricity prices and water use and who pays for the upgrades. What used to be a niche tech issue has suddenly become an energy and infrastructure story, which is why we see it everywhere.
What are some arguments for and against data centers?
Well, data centers are the foundation of the internet. They are essential infrastructure like railroads or power plants or highways and they are driving a lot of the investment in tech and energy right now. They can help improve U.S. innovation for artificial intelligence. Now, the challenge has been that since these data centers can be constructed quickly and show up into communities quickly, it's kind of like a little steel mill popping up in a town overnight. There's a lot of electricity that's used. There's concerns in many areas about water. There's concerns about other challenges.
The issue is, what does the future with data centers and artificial intelligence look like in the United States? Is it one that is good for communities, or is it one that communities take a backseat to? There's challenges with who pays for the grid upgrades that data centers often require. There's challenges with being transparent about energy and water use and also local emissions if there are fossil fuels used on site to make sure that additional pollution is not coming into communities.
Then there's the opportunity to align this data center growth with clean power development. One of the things that we think about is this represents a national test for how we handle the growth of the new electricity use in the United States. We need to ensure that we are growing electricity use in the United States so that we can power and electrify our homes and vehicles and factories in ways that don't pollute communities and don't harm the climate. But if we can't grow and do data center demand in a way that is good for communities, we're going to run into bigger problems when we try to electrify larger parts of the economy. So the debate about data centers isn't whether they exist, it's under what rules.
What are the potential problems data centers can cause? Is there a middle ground or a compromise?
There have been challenges noted around the country, including in Tennessee, where a data center was burning fossil fuels on site to provide power and generating new emissions in communities. There have been challenges with electricity price spikes and grid capacity issues in different parts of the country. There are several states where data centers now consume more than 10% of the state's electricity.
In Virginia, data centers consume upwards of 25 to 40% of the state's electricity. The challenges that communities are facing is moving from a time where electricity demand in the United States was not really growing because of efficiency and because of other structural factors in the economy. The electricity demand in the United States was largely flat for the last two decades. Now, largely because of data centers, that electricity demand is growing again, and it's growing at rates that the electricity grid and the administrative infrastructure is not accustomed to, or at least hasn't been accustomed to for a few decades.
The challenge now is, what does a potential middle ground look like? Well, [there's] an opportunity for data centers to grow with clean energy, an opportunity for data centers to not increase the price of electricity for local residential customers, and to be good stewards of their local environment with emissions and with water and other resource use. There's an opportunity to get data centers right. That window is closing because a lot of the data center development that we're going to see over the next 15 years is happening right now. Communities need to ensure that the growth of data centers is good for everybody. With thoughtful input and partnership, it can be.
Would you consider Wisconsin to be a hotbed for data centers?
Wisconsin is not a national data center hub right now like northern Virginia is. But Wisconsin has a lot of attributes that make it attractive to the potential growth of data centers. It's relatively affordable land. Wisconsin has a cooler climate, which helps with the electricity demands of cooling data centers down. Wisconsin has access to the Midwest power grid.
What's notable is that in Wisconsin, proposals are being examined in the way that folks might examine other power-hungry industries — something like a paper mill or a manufacturing plant. There are costs and benefits in doing that. It's important that Wisconsin and Wisconsin communities evaluate the best path forward for them.
Will data centers become obsolete?
Just as factories didn't disappear when new technologies arrived, data centers are unlikely to disappear. But they will evolve. There was a large drive for energy efficiency in data centers over the last decade. We might be hitting a limit of how much new efficiency that we can wring out of current technology of data centers. But there are opportunities to make data centers a lot more energy efficient and a lot less stressful on the grid by: making data centers flexible and responsive to the ways that the rest of the community is using electricity at a certain time, using new cooling technologies that use a lot less water or no water at all, using a lot less electricity.
Still, the demand growth of data centers that is increasing every year will not be solved by energy efficiency alone. In order for data centers to keep growing in the United States, we will need more electricity, and more clean electricity so that the growth of data centers is not harmful to communities and the environment. What we're likely to see over the next five to 15 years is a new infrastructure of data centers evolving in different regions of the country that are going to shape electricity demand for a couple decades. The real question is whether we plan for them or we let them plan for us. There's an opportunity now to design the future that we want that provides the innovation benefits of the internet with the community benefits of industries.
Is there anything that you'd like to add that we haven't talked about?
I think one thing that folks might not realize is how big data centers have gotten. When we think about the power demands of a data center, you can think about the Hoover Dam. The Hoover Dam can produce up to two gigawatts of power. There are proposals for data centers that are up to, and sometimes even over, one gigawatt of power use. So you have data centers that use half as much power as what the Hoover Dam can generate.
When those show up in a town or region relatively quickly, there is a scramble to make sure that the grid can handle this type of electricity demand this quickly. I have confidence in the engineers and planners of regional electricity grids that we will keep the lights on. But it requires really thoughtful integration, planning a new clean electricity supply to make this all work. There's been projections that upwards of 90% of the projected data center demand growth between now and 2050 will happen in the next 10 years, meaning it's really important to get these next 10 years right.
