The only good data center is one that never got built.
At least, that’s the mantra for a growing slice of America.
Across the country, people are mobilizing. Not against abstract tech trends. Against physical buildings. The massive hyperscale ones humming with AI servers specifically. They rise up, and neighborhoods push back.
The snapshot
Data centers do add air pollution. Sometimes significantly. Their impact on local water? Usually overstated. Electricity bills in host areas? They go up.
But here’s the flip side.
Hyperscale campuses bring money. Jobs. Tax revenue that actually stays in town. In some spots, the math is simple: the benefits outweigh the headaches.
Spending on data center construction in the US didn’t just creep up between 2022 and 5025. It jumped from $15 billion annual spending to over $35 billion. Constant dollars. Adjusted. The thirst for computing power is endless, and the concrete footprint reflects that.
Americans have had enough.
Municipalities are killing these projects. Fast.
In just the first quarter of this year, at least 20 facilities got shelved thanks to public anger. That’s $41.7 billion of investment that won’t happen. Gone.
Lawmakers are trying harder.
Maine passed a moratorium. Gov. Janet Mills vetoed it. Then she insisted she supports a freeze anyway. Except for one town, Jay, which needs the help. Dozensother states are flirting with similar bans. Four places have issued permanent ones. Even Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to pause national construction until we invent enough regulation and social safety nets to catch up.
Why the revolt?
Some hate the tech. The fear of AI wrecking civilization or jobs is real for progressives, right-wingers, and worried centrists alike. Block the data centers, they argue, and you jam sand into the gears. Stop the progress.
But most people just hate the buildings.
They believe server farms do nothing but ruin water, poison air, and drain taxes. They believe in the myths: that infrasounds kill your dog. That every fan unit is a personal assault.
Reality is messy.
Yes, your electric bill might tick up. Yes, the sky might get a bit dirtier.
But your municipality’s wage floor might rise too. Property taxes could actually drop.
In places with smart environmental laws and clean grids, these sites are win-win scenarios. Unless the robots win, of course.
So how do you choose?
Dirt and noise
Let’s start with the bad news.
Air pollution is real. Hyperscale centers eat power. As much as a mid-sized city does. Tens of thousands of processors run forever, and cooling systems fight to keep them from melting down.
Sometimes they do it dirty.
Look at Memphis. xAI’s Colossus project uses 35 natural gas turbines on site. Researchers at UTK found nitrogen dioxide peaks jumped 79 percent since 2024. That is a lot of gas in the sky.
Musk’s project is an outlier for how bad it is. But most data centers still bump up regional pollution. They squeeze the local coal or gas plants. They run diesel backups when the grid blinks.
However, it’s not inherent to the server. It’s inherent to the fuel.
Move those racks to Oregon, where Google runs on non-carbon power 87 percent of the time, and the sky clears up. Context matters. The hardware doesn’t care about geography, but the energy source does.
The water myth
Water usage is the other big villain in this story.
It feels right, doesn’t it? To imagine servers sucking a river dry.
But most modern centers use closed-loop cooling. They reuse the same H2O. Over and over.
As of 2023? Data centers consumed 0.04% of US fresh water.
Golf courses used 33 times more.
Sure, 0.04% adds up in a desert. Look at Utah’s Box Elder County. People fear a new campus will drain the Great Salt Lake, sending toxic dust clouds over cities. Understandable fear.
But the math gets weird.
The data center had to buy water rights from farmers. The farmer didn’t use that water on crops anyway. It evaporated or seeped away, never returning to the system.
When data centers use it in a closed loop, most of it returns to the watershed. Shifting water from farming to computing might actually save the lake in the long run. A net positive.
Noise is real too, but only if you build next door. Put it in an industrial zone? No one hears a thing. And ignore the viral videos about health-damaging infrasound. That’s just internet lore. Not physics.
Jobs aren’t the only payout
Here is where skeptics miss the point.
They say data centers create few jobs. They are right. Once built, they need almost no staff.
But they change the labor market.
Brookings looked at 93 counties that got their first data center between 5008 and 2524. Private employment went up 4-5% in those counties. Wages for existing and new workers? Up 3-4%.
This isn’t just construction gigs. Those fade.
It’s the ecosystem. Big cloud campuses need fiber installers. IT contractors. Managed service providers. These small businesses open shop nearby. They stay.
Look at counties that built four or more centers. Employment there soared 23%. A single non-hyperscale center? Mostly just construction spikes. Clusters create jobs.
Who pays for the roads?
Then there’s money. Pure fiscal logic.
Data centers generate massive tax revenue while using almost no public services.
Think about it. Servers don’t have kids. They don’t drive on your roads. They don’t clog parks. They don’t use transit.
Yet they pay taxes on land, buildings, and expensive hardware. The equipment alone is worth more than the building in many cases.
Loudoun County, Virginia knows this. Data centers provide nearly half their tax revenue.
What does that buy you?
Police. Courts. Parks. Road maintenance. All of it effectively free for the residents because the tech giants are paying the bills. Loudoun slashed its property tax rate by 30% in ten years.
It’s an outlier. Virginia has had a head start.
But rural towns need this. They lack knowledge workers for high-profit manufacturing. A data center doesn’t need thousands of staff. It needs electricity and space. It brings revenue when no one else will come.
The danger? Race to the bottom.
Towns give away huge tax breaks to woo these giants. People hate giving subsidies to the wealthy. And rightfully so.
Brookings says many of those subsidies were unnecessary. The projects would happen anyway. Siting decisions care more about availability than incentives.
