Tech companies have So much money has been invested in building data centers in recent months, it’s actively driving the US economy – and the AI race shows 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 already committed to spending $1.4 trillion.
A comprehensive new analysis looks at the environmental footprint of data centers in the US to find out, exactly, what the country may face as this construction continues over the next few years – and where the US should build data centers to avoid the most harmful environmental impacts.
The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, uses a variety of data to estimate the potential environmental impacts of future data centers by the end of the decade, including information on demand for AI chips and state electricity and water shortages. The study models several different possible scenarios for how data centers could impact the US and the planet — and warns that tech companies’ net zero promises are unlikely to stack up against the energy and water needs of the huge facilities they are building.
Fengqi Yu, a professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell and one of the authors of the analysis, says the study, which began three years ago, is “a perfect time to understand how AI is impacting climate systems and water use and consumption.”
The AI industry is “growing much faster than we expected,” he added, especially with the Trump administration’s laser focus on the industry. “This whole thing is gaining a lot of momentum right now.”
Not all data centers are created equal environmentally: much of their water and carbon footprint depends on where they are located. Some US states may have grids that run more on renewable energy, or are making great progress in putting more clean energy on the grid; This greatly reduces 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 accounts for a large portion of data center energy use.) The best locations for data centers in the U.S. over the next few years 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.”
Most data center construction in the US has historically been concentrated in places like Virginia, America’s data center hub, and Northern California. It was important for data center companies to be close to Washington, DC and Silicon Valley, as well as the dense fiber connectivity in those areas and their skilled workforce. Virginia has also offered substantial tax breaks for data centers for years — a technique that other states have been using to entice development. According to Data Center Map, an industry tool that tracks data center growth, of the more than 4,000 data centers in the U.S., more than 650 are in Virginia – the most in the country – and more than 320 are in California, which ranks third.