The data center alarm heard ’round the world

TL;DR: New York just became the first US state to freeze new data center construction. It comes as the costs of the AI infrastructure build-out—to the air, the water, the grid, and your power bill—are landing in nearly every corner of the world. Still, hyperscalers remain committed to pumping billions into ever-bigger AI server farms.

What happened: New York’s moratorium covers data centers that draw 50 megawatts or more (which is to say, most of the behemoths proposed in recent years) and lasts for up to one year. That power threshold allows smaller data centers serving places like hospitals to keep building, according to the governor’s office.

Data centers’ impact is far from just an American worry, though. Here’s a rogues’ gallery of headlines from the last few months:

• Ireland is basically running a country for the servers. The nation’s data centers sucked up almost as much electricity as all residential homes last year, making up 23% of its power consumption despite a temporary freeze on new data center grid connections in the Dublin area in 2021.
• Denmark hits the brakes on its power grid. The country’s grid operator paused all new large-scale power connection requests because of demand overload: Roughly 14 gigawatts of new data center projects were waiting to be connected before the moratorium, double Denmark’s peak electricity demand.
• Chile’s megadrought vs. data centers. The data center boom is straining a Chilean wetland region that’s already been experiencing a 15-year drought. Servers in the area now account for about 62% of the community’s power consumption.
• Mon dieu! As of March, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft alone were putting out about a third of the CO2-equivalent emissions that all of France does, a figure that’s rising due to aggressive data center build-outs, per the Guardian.

AI companies, for their part, keep making promises to invest in the towns they’re building in and cover their own power costs—electricity in some parts of the US will cost consumers an extra $23 billion through 2028, largely thanks to data centers. (One proposed PR fix out of left field—designing “prettier” data centers.) And just yesterday, Meta announced that its already-under-construction Louisiana project will now have more than double the power capacity it originally planned, from 2 to 5GW.

Bottom line: The fight to slow down data centers is landing a lot of press, along with some real punches—but Big Tech is still winning the war, plowing ahead with its gigantic data center dreams. —WK