A new report from the climate advocacy nonprofit Food and Water Watch says artificial intelligence data centers across the nation consume outsized amounts of energy, undermine progress toward adopting clean energy portfolios and threaten limited water supplies.
The report, which was published Wednesday and is titled The Urgent Case Against Data Centers, calls the proliferation of these developments “one of the greatest environmental and social challenges of our generation.”
The report finds that one hyperscale data center can use as much energy as 2 million U.S. households and warns that by 2028, data centers across the nation could collectively use as much water as 18.5 million households. While residential utility rates have increased in some cases, the report notes that a growing number of AI data center developers propose creating their own energy infrastructure – often relying on gas, coal or nuclear power – to support the data centers.
Data centers in and of themselves are not new to many communities across the country. For decades, developers have built data centers to power web and computing services. But an “unprecedented” demand for AI applications has led to a spike in energy and water consumption, Food and Water Watch Research Director Amanda Starbuck said.
“It’s not the same data center that we knew 10 or 20 years ago, especially the ones that are powering AI searches,” she told Source NM. “The amount of water that’s used to produce electricity to run those, as well as the water just to cool these high-powered servers and chips, it’s unprecedented.”
That increased demand threatens progress in adopting clean energy sources, Starbuck said.
The Southwest has long been a destination for such development. Its wide open tracts of land and dry climate, in which evaporative cooling systems operate most efficiently, have lured many tech giants to the region – the Phoenix metro area is the fourth-largest data center market in the U.S., according to real estate firm CBRE. But AI data centers take a different approach to that development.
In Utah, the Food and Water Watch report found that lawmakers rolled back investments in renewable energy and extended the life of coal plants that were slated to be decommissioned to power AI data centers. In Arizona, lawmakers have considered a bill that would prohibit counties from regulating nuclear reactors located on-site with data centers. And in New Mexico, a push to regulate on-site power sources like natural gas plants died in the recent legislative session.
The massive OpenAI and Oracle data center campus planned for Doña Ana County, known as Project Jupiter, is part of the national “Stargate Project,” which seeks to rapidly build AI infrastructure across the nation. County officials late last year OK’d $165 billion in bonds for the project.
New Mexico Environment Department officials are currently weighing whether or not to issue two air quality permits to the project’s developers, who are seeking permission to build two natural gas generating stations on-site to power the data center campus. Source NM previously reported that the resulting emissions could rival New Mexico’s two largest cities combined.
On Wednesday, Source NM reported that a Texas energy company is seeking federal approval to build a $60 million gas pipeline for Project Jupiter. The company has asked for permission to commence construction on April 15, just two days after the public comment period closes.
