Data centers have become essential national infrastructure powering everything from banking systems to healthcare, government services, and platforms like ChatGPT and Facebook. Yet public discourse and the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) movement increasingly frame them as environmental liabilities. 

That sentiment is now shaping public policy. New York has approved a one-year pause on permits for new large-scale data centers while officials review their impact. Meanwhile, Virginia (home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers) has become the first US state to introduce an electricity consumption tax on data centers. 

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The truth is: life as we know it would be on pause if it were not for our country’s data centers. Our digital consumption, our appetite for new AI services, and the speed and scale at which we demand them, is driving the expansion of this infrastructure and drawing them closer to our homes. It’s pushing infrastructure into smaller communities, resulting in power and water demand spreading into regions that never expected to host this kind of industrial infrastructure.

Research from the International Data Center Authority’s Global Digital Economy Report........

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