This week residents in dozens of US cities and towns voted against new data centers, and opposition won almost everywhere. To see why, you need to understand what a data center is, and why AI turned it from a dull building on the edge of town into a political battleground.
A data center is a large building full of server racks, powerful computers running around the clock. Every time you watch a YouTube video, save a photo to the cloud or ask ChatGPT a question, the computing happens in one of these buildings. Data centers have existed for decades, but AI changed the scale: AI chips use far more power than ordinary servers, and new data centers are planned to consume as much electricity as an entire city.
That consumption has two parts. The first is the power the chips use to compute. The second is cooling: hot chips must be cooled, using huge air-conditioning systems or water-based cooling. That is why in some places data centers also use large amounts of water, a particularly sensitive issue in dry regions.
Opposition stems from several fears. Residents worry that heavy power demand will raise their bills, that data centers will use water the community needs, and that they will be noisy and take up land while creating relatively few jobs once construction ends. Some companies are responding: OpenAI, for example, pledged to fund power infrastructure for its Stargate sites so residents do not pay more, and some are pursuing on-site power generation.
And in Israel? Cloud giants including Amazon and Google run data centers here and have opened local cloud regions in recent years. Data centers in Israel face the same questions of power, land and water on a smaller scale. As demand for AI grows, the question of where to build data centers and who pays for their electricity will arrive here too.
