In rural Dane County, Wisconsin, a developer wants to build a data center campus with 15 buildings over the next decade.
Texas will serve as the home base for Stargate, a $500 billion effort to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, with 10 data centers under construction and 10 more planned.
In Kansas City, Kansas, developers are looking to build a data center at a defunct power plant.
DATA CENTERS are expanding across the U.S. to meet growing demand for artificial intelligence, but their growth also raises thorny questions over resources.
The centers are among the most energy-intensive types of buildings, consuming 10 to 50 times the energy of a commercial office building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. A 2024 federal report found data centers consumed about 4.4% of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and that could nearly triple to 12% by 2028.
They can also be water-intensive buildings. For example, Google’s U.S. data centers consumed 12.7 billion liters of fresh water for cooling in 2021, according to the University of California Riverside. Three years later, the company consumed more than 30 billion liters. UC Riverside estimates that running 20 to 50 ChatGPT queries uses roughly half a liter of fresh water.
Zack Pistora, director of the Sierra Club’s Kansas chapter, said he believes the tech companies behind data centers have a responsibility to work to mitigate the environmental impacts of their developments.
“These are some of the richest companies in America, and maybe across the world,” he said. “To ask them to make sure that residents don’t pay more in terms of their electric or water bills, [or] to do right by choosing the right energy sources to not pollute the community or the planet, we feel isn’t too much to ask.”
Energy and economics
The Kansas City area is scrambling to attract data centers in both Missouri and Kansas. While neither state is a hotspot for development yet, environmentalists are watching closely as developers circle.
A company called PowerTransitions is looking to build a data center at the site of a defunct power station in Kansas City, Kansas, for instance. The plant shut down coal usage around 10 years ago but kept oil burners at the site, said Ty Gorman, a senior campaign organizing strategist at the Sierra Club’s Kansas chapter.
The data center will need 192 megawatts of power, Gorman said.
“The details of that aren’t approved yet, just the zoning and the sale are approved,” he said. “There’s still a community benefits and power agreement to be hashed out with that data center.”
Because the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities, which serves Kansas City, Kansas, is a municipal utility, rather than an investor-owned utility, Gorman said his hope is that it would look to meet increased electricity demand through clean energy instead of fossil fuel generation.
“Investor-owned utilities have a profit motive to own everything and own the most expensive things they can get approved,” he said. “And BPU does not, so it would seem like the data center would be able to go towards the cheapest option, which would be solar and storage.”
Even so, Gorman also said data centers boosting demand does pose real risks to the clean energy transition and efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change.
“The threat of data centers to a livable planet, I think, is very real, and we’re at a tipping point as far as how we deal with the increased requirements to meet this electric need over the next few years,” he added.
