The real cost of data centers

Hartmann Report - Polling by Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans are against having an AI data center in their community, and that number includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. They get it that the much-ballyhooed “cloud” is actually a gigantic collection of massive industrial buildings that consume staggering amounts of electricity and water, produce both air and noise pollution, and more often than not jack up local utility bills and buy off corrupt local politicians to get tax abatements.

The Department of Energy says that data centers sucked up 4.4 percent of all the electricity generated in America in 2023; by 2028, DOE says, that number could be 12 percent, or about an eighth of all the power produced in our country. And once the buildings go up, the number of jobs created is negligible.

Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and other tech giants often negotiate special “bulk” electricity rates behind closed doors, sticking homeowners and local small businesses with the cost of expanding the grid and power plant capacity.

Researchers at Harvard’s Electricity Law Initiative documented how these data center costs are rapidly being shifted from the companies to the public. For example, Meta/Facebook is planning a new data center in Louisiana that would suck up about twice as much electricity as the entire city of New Orleans, and require around $3 billion to build out the gas-fired generator capacity it’ll need.