Ford School professor Ben Green's research on the impacts of data centers recently caught the eye of Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, which asked him to deliver a presentation on the topic to its Citizens Advisory Council on November 12.
The presentation drew from his new report, titled "What Happens When Data Centers Come to Town?" Professor Green highlighted many concerning findings, including how data centers negatively impact the environment and the economies of the communities where they reside.
Green explained to the audience that when data centers enter a community, they put tremendous strain on energy and water infrastructure, leading to unreliable and more costly utilities. For example, using ChatGPT to write an email 100 words long uses the same amount of energy it would take to run a LED lightbulb for 14 hours. Running the same task also uses up one bottle-sized amount of freshwater. When uses for AI models are scaled up in both quantity and complexity, resource management quickly gets out of hand. Google's data centers alone use 6 billion gallons of water annually.
Increased demand requires better infrastructure, which costs money. In areas where infrastructure hasn't been upgraded, volatility on the energy grid due to surges in energy demand can lead to sparks, fires, and broken appliances in people's homes. Green shared an estimate from Bloomberg that indicates consumer electric bills have more than doubled in the past five years in areas close to data centers.
At the same time, data centers have bargained for discounted energy rates and tax breaks from the communities they target for construction. Green cited a report from Good Jobs First on tax breaks in Texas, noting that "over the span of two years, Texas revised its estimate of the tax breaks that they were providing to data centers from $130 million to $1 billion." That billion dollars in lost tax revenue is supposed to be exchanged for more job opportunities in data centers. But this often ends up being a false promise, since data centers actually need very few workers to run them, said Green.
Worse yet, the true impact of data centers entering communities across the country is hard to quantify because companies maneuver to keep that information quiet. Green noted that companies "often have binding nondisclosure agreements or other types of arrangements with the local government" to prevent negotiations and statistics from being publicly available. Green also shared that even when there is legislative momentum to mandate disclosure on things like water consumption, the data center industry lobbies to quell it.
Read a full summary of Professor Green's remarks here.
