From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities(wri.org)
wri.org
From Energy Use to Air Quality, the Many Ways Data Centers Affect US Communities
https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts
https://www.wri.org/insights/us-data-center-growth-impacts
Hyperscale ai facilities and a typical colocation or regional cloud node don’t behave the same in terms of power, water or local impact, but they often get grouped together in policy debates.
From an ops perspective most smaller sites spend years optimizing cooling efficiency, power density and redundancy because energy costs directly hit margins. the giant ai campuses operate on a completely different economic model where scale and speed matter more than local efficiency.
Feels like a lot of community backlash is really about hyperscale growth being treated as “just another data center”, when it’s closer to heavy industry in terms of resource planning.