Science and Technology

Data centers are popping up all over the world at stunning speed. But not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat.

Countries have long housed power-hungry data centers—the facilities packed with computing infrastructure that underpins the internet as we know it. But their numbers have exploded amid the global artificial intelligence race, which requires massive computing power. That has led to the spread of even bigger data centers around the world, including the more controversial “hyperscale” facilities used by tech giants.

Data centers are popping up all over the world at stunning speed. But not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat.

Countries have long housed power-hungry data centers—the facilities packed with computing infrastructure that underpins the internet as we know it. But their numbers have exploded amid the global artificial intelligence race, which requires massive computing power. That has led to the spread of even bigger data centers around the world, including the more controversial “hyperscale” facilities used by tech giants.

Last year, data centers consumed more electricity than all but 10 countries, according to a United Nations University report, with even more to come. If data centers were their own country, BloombergNEF forecasted that they are set to gobble up so much energy by 2035 that they could rank among the top 5 countries in terms of electricity use.

!function(e,n,i,s){var d="InfogramEmbeds";var o=e.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];if(window[d]&&window[d].initialized)window[d].process&&window[d].process();else if(!e.getElementById(i)){var r=e.createElement(n);r.async=1,r.id=i,r.src=s,o.parentNode.insertBefore(r,o)}}(document,"script","infogram-async","https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js"); While governments have courted data centers due to their potential economic benefits, many local communities have resisted their development over concerns about the impact on jobs, energy bills, water usage, and the environment. From Chile to Scotland to Australia, opposition to the massive facilities has erupted around the entire world.

“It’s a complicated moment,” said Boris Gamazaychikov, co-founder of the Sustainable AI Group, a research firm that focuses on AI’s environmental impacts. “The space is really polarized.”

As data centers proliferate, Foreign Policy looked at what their global footprint looks like right now and how it might evolve in the coming years.

A technician works at an Amazon Web Services data center in New Carlisle, Indiana, on Oct. 2, 2025. Noah Berger/Getty Images via Amazon Web Services

To grasp the full scale and scope of these facilities’ global footprint, it’s important to first establish that it’s only the beginning of the boom. The world is still in the early stages of deploying data centers and AI, and significant growth is expected, according to........

© Foreign Policy