Tech companies have invested so much money in building data centers in recent months, it’s actively driving the US economy—and the AI race is showing no signs of slowing down. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg told President Donald Trump last week that the company would spend $600 billion on US infrastructure—including data centers—by 2028, while OpenAI has committed already to spending $1.4 trillion.
An extensive new analysis looks at the environmental footprint of data centers in the US to get a handle on what, exactly, the country might be facing as this buildout continues over the next few years—and where the US should be building data centers to avoid the most harmful environmental impacts.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications on Monday, uses a variety of data, including demand for AI chips and information on state electricity and water scarcity, to project the potential environmental impacts of future data centers through the end of the decade. The study models a number of different possible scenarios on how data centers could affect the US and the planet—and cautions that tech companies’ net zero promises aren’t likely to hold up against the energy and water needs of the massive facilities they’re building.
Fengqi You, a professor in energy systems engineering at Cornell and one of the authors of the analysis, says that the study, which began three years ago, comes at “a perfect time to understand how AI is making an impact on climate systems and water usage and consumption.”
The AI industry “is growing much faster than we expected,” he adds—especially with the Trump administration’s laser focus on the industry. “This whole thing is just getting so much momentum right now.”
Not all data centers are created environmentally equal: a lot of their water and carbon footprint depends on where they’re located. Some US states may have grids that run more on renewable energy, or are making big strides in putting more clean energy on the grid; this greatly lessens the carbon emissions from data centers that draw power from those grids. Similarly, states with less water scarcity are better suited to provide the large amounts of water needed for cooling data centers. (Cooling also constitutes a big part of data center energy use.) The best locations for a data center over the next few years in the US are states that strike a balance between these two inputs: Texas, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota, the analysis finds, are “optimal candidates for AI server installations.”
Much of the data center buildout in the US has historically focused on places like Virginia, the data center hub of the US, and Northern California. Being close to Washington, DC, and Silicon Valley was important to data center companies, as were the dense fiber connectivity in those regions and their skilled workforces. Virginia has also offered substantial tax breaks for data centers for years—one technique other states are turning to to lure development. According to Data Center Map, an industry tool that tracks data center development, of the 4,000-plus data centers in the US, more than 650 are in Virginia—the most in the country—and California has more than 320, ranking third.