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Data centers could actually be good for your hometown

The case for the buildings America loves to hate.

The only good data center is a canceled data center.

Or so a growing number of Americans seem to feel.

Throughout the United States, citizens are mobilizing against the construction of new data centers in general — and the massive, “hyperscale” ones that fuel artificial intelligence, in particular.

Data centers can increase local air pollution, though their emissions vary widely between different contexts. Their impact on local water supplies, meanwhile, has been greatly exaggerated.

Data centers often drive up an area’s electricity bills.

But hyperscale campuses can deliver major economic benefits to their host communities, including job growth and tax revenue.

In some cases, the benefits of data center development almost certainly outweigh the costs.

The past four years have witnessed an unprecedented boom in the construction of such facilities, driven by AI firms’ insatiable thirst for computing power. Between 2022 and 2025, annual spending on the creation of data centers in the United States jumped from $15 billion to over $35 billion, in constant dollars.

And many Americans have had enough.

At the local level, municipalities are nixing data center projects at a historic clip. Over the first three months of this year, plans for at least 20 such facilities have been shelved amid public backlash, according to an analysis by Heatmap Pro. Together, those canceled projects represent $41.7 billion in forgone investment.

In statehouses and Congress, meanwhile, lawmakers are pushing to freeze data center construction outright. Last month, Maine’s state legislature passed a moratorium on new data centers in the state. Gov. Janet Mills ultimately vetoed that legislation, but insisted that she too supported freezing all data center construction in Maine, except for a single, long-planned project in the economically challenged town of Jay.

At least 12 other states are entertaining data center moratoria, while four municipalities have imposed permanent bans. In the Senate, Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill that would pause the construction of AI supercomputing campuses nationwide, until a long list of regulations and social programs are enacted.

This rebellion against data centers is partly motivated by concerns about artificial intelligence. Some progressives, right-wing populists, and tech-wary centrists believe that unfettered AI development poses intolerably high risks — to workers’ economic security, the Earth’s climate, and/or humanity’s survival. From this perspective, the point of blocking new data centers is primarily to throw sand into the gears of AI progress. And if artificial intelligence really is on the cusp of wrecking civilization, then trying to choke off Big Tech’s access to computing power makes some sense.

That said, much of the resistance to data centers is rooted in anxieties about the buildings themselves.

Many Americans have come to think that these industrial complexes offer little to their host communities beyond economic burdens and ecological devastation. Judging by activist rhetoric and viral media accounts, data centers invariably slurp up localities’ water, pollute their air, despoil their landscapes, and poison their residents with “infrasounds” — all while driving up municipalities’ electricity bills and sponging off their tax dollars.

But the truth is more complicated.

If a large data center comes to your town, it could make the local environment slightly worse — and your electric bill somewhat higher. But it could also raise your municipality’s wages, while reducing its property tax rates.

The scale of these costs and benefits vary widely from place to place. Yet in areas with sound environmental regulations, relatively clean and robust electric grids, and progressive tax codes, data centers tend to be a “win-win” for both residents and large tech companies (assuming the latter don’t get the former killed in a robot apocalypse, anyway).

So, how do you decide whether your community should welcome hundreds of acres of computing hardware? Let’s examine the (real and imagined) environmental harms and material upsides point by point — and how the balance between them shifts with local conditions.

Data centers can be dirty

Data centers do come with some environmental costs. But........

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