Where Can the Data Centers Go?

During a discussion of data centers’ environmental and public health impacts at yesterday’s meeting of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) asked what one would assume she thought was a devastating rhetorical question. 

“Ask Peter Thiel, ask Elon Musk, ask Mark Zuckerberg if they want one of these data centers in their own backyard,” she said. “Ask any one of us here on this committee. If anyone wants to live right next to one of these data centers here on this committee, please raise your hand.”

This is pretty standard populist demagoguery. The billionaires investing in data centers don’t want to live next to them, so why should you have to? 

The congresswoman is probably not wrong that few billionaires would want to live next to a data center. If you can afford the scenic ocean view, why choose a boxy warehouse building full of computers as your neighbor? 

Ocasio-Cortez’s latest anti-data center grandstanding does raise one question, though. Where exactly does she think data centers can go? 

In her committee remarks, she references two specific data centers: xAI’s massive new facility in southwest Memphis and Meta’s site in Stanton Springs industrial park in rural Georgia. 

The former has provoked local opposition because of power-generating gas turbines the company installed on-site that produce nitrogen oxide emissions. 

Community groups and environmental organizations have sued xAI, alleging Clean Air Act violations. 

For their part, the company and local officials say that many of the gas turbines have been turned off following the construction of a new substation to provide power to the site and that they were adding scrubbing technology to cut their emissions. 

Meta’s Stanton Springs site has been a steady staple of Ocasio-Cortez’s committee hearing attacks on data centers. In May, she held up a jar of dirty water, which she claimed had been contaminated during the site’s construction. 

Meta itself strongly denies that its data center project has caused any pollution of local water sources. Local officials told the Environmental Protection Agency they hadn’t seen any increased requests for well water testing. For context, the water pollution some have attributed to Meta’s project is limited to a handful of private wells. 

Meanwhile, xAI’s Memphis data center is in an industrial area of the city that has long been host to pretty dirty industries, including “fossil fuel burning, steel, refining, and food processing industries.” 

One can understand why locals who’ve long contended with nearby polluting industries would want to limit any additional sources of harmful emissions. 

Even so, if every industrial use in South Memphis were replaced by a data center, the air would almost certainly get a lot cleaner. 

Compare South Memphis to a place like Loudon County, Virginia, which hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers. According to the American Lung Association, the county’s air has continued to get a lot cleaner, even as data center construction has grown exponentially in the area. 

All things considered, data centers are pretty innocuous land uses. They consume water and power and produce heat. 

They can be dirtier if they, like xAI’s Memphis facility, burn fuel to produce their own power on-site.

Their construction can also cause negative environmental impacts, although that’s more attributable to the fact that these facilities are big than to the idea that data center operations are inherently dirty.

Regulation has a role to play in mitigating the pollution they do cause. But markets already do a lot to reduce data centers’ local impacts. 

These are big, land-hungry facilities. That’s why most data centers are built in existing industrial zones and/or rural areas where land is cheap. 

Land is cheap in those areas because there isn’t a lot of competition for acreage from people and businesses that also want to locate there. 

In other words, the economics of data centers encourage these facilities to be built in areas where there aren’t a lot of people who’ll be affected by their (usually minimal) local impacts.  

Ocasio-Cortez is seizing on, at best, an outlier of a relatively dirty data center, in the case of xAI’s Memphis site, and a likely made-up panic, in the case of Meta’s Georgia facility, to argue that even rural and industrial areas are too pristine to host data centers. 

It’s worth noting that even when data centers are planned for the literal middle of nowhere, as is the case with the massive Stratos data center in rural Box Elder County, Utah, people still find reasons to oppose it.

But if one has any optimism about the prospects of AI, or even just likes streaming Spotify and using Google Docs, data centers have to go somewhere.