Tech companies have it He’s invested heavily in building capital in recent months, actively driving the US economy – and the AI race shows no signs of slowing down. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Chief told President Donald Trump last week that the company would spend $600 billion on US infrastructure – including 2028, while OpenAI has spent $1.4 trillion.
A more recent analysis looks at the environment of data centers in the US to get a handle on what, exactly, the country may be facing as this crisis continues in the next few years – and where it should build data centers to avoid the most dangerous environmental impacts.
The study, published in the journal Natural Communications on Monday, includes the demand for AI data and information on the state’s electricity and water shortages, to consider the possible environmental impacts of data centers in the future at the end of the decade. Learning models have many different possibilities for how data centers can affect the US and the planet – and zero-zero tech provisions are likely to hold up in the fight against energy demands.
Fengaqi, a professor of energy engineering at Cornell and one of the authors of the analysis, said that the study, which was the first to understand that AI makes an impact on climate systems and water use. “
The AI industry is “growing much faster than we expected,” it adds — especially with the Trump Administration’s laser focus on the industry. “This whole thing is just gaining momentum now.”
Not all data centers are created equal in nature: Much of their water and carbon footprint depends on where they are located. Some US states may have grids that run heavily on renewable energy, or are making great strides in building clean energy into the grid; This significantly reduces carbon emissions from data centers that draw power from those grids. Similarly, states with less water scarcity are better equipped to supply the large amounts of water needed to cool data centers. (Cooling also makes up a large portion of data center power consumption
Most of the Data Center LabOut in the US is concentrated in places like Virginia, the US data center, and Northern California. Proximity to Washington, DC, and Silicon Valley was important for data center companies, as were the dense connections of those regions and their potential losses. Virginia has also offered large tax breaks for data centers for years — a practice other states are turning to for continued development. According to the data center map, an industry tool that tracks data center development, of the 4,000 data centers in the US, more than 650 are in Virginia – most of the state in California is more than 320 years old, which ranks third.
