One of the biggest “David versus Goliath” stories in tech right now is the towns beset by AI data center projects they may or may not have asked for. Powered By Who is tracking data center development in the US on this convenient map.
Currently, there are over 2,100 data centers being tracked by the project ranging from proposals to sites fully up-and-running. While you have to build bypasses data centers to keep the internet running (which we’re partial to here at Hackaday), there are certainly questions around the amount of power and water consumed by these sites, the emissions they’re sending into the surrounding community, and who exactly is reaping the benefits.
Whether you’re pro, against, or ambivalent about the proliferation of “AI” data centers, the map offers an engaging way to look at what projects are happening around the nation, especially when you start looking at clusters and how that interacts with the power generation and political makeup in a region. It’s particularly interesting how only three states account for roughly 70% of all the projects. Let us know if there’s a similar tracker in your area if you’re from one of the other parts of the globe!
Looking past the debate, there’s a lot of interesting engineering involved in keeping these data centers cool, although there are questions about where that heat ends up going. DC distribution inside the site, underwater data centers, and even putting them in space are some of the solutions for keeping the cooling loads tamed.
I am torn on this subject–in that the NIMBY protesters likely have endless pictures of their food, their office functions, birthday parties and theme park visits clogging the server farms that do exist …so if they want to be taken seriously, turn in and put down your smart phone before you pick up a protest sign.
Just remember, one person’s protester is another person’s bully…and it is probably some wage-an-hour night watchman paid less than you –that’s the only individual you will see…not Elon.
In the old days of physical media, all such vanity junk stayed safely in the attic on VHS or Super-8 reels away from society. It isn’t as if these server farms were full of discourse over the Riemann Hypothesis….that was back in the day of CERN and Cerf and Henry Spencer graybeards.
That all having been said, they do use a lot of water, but I am hoping all optical systems are on the way:
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-lasers-aim-electron-currents-semiconductor.html
I am reminded of a Buck Rogers episode where things were so advanced that they largely forgot about electricity….the Khan-like Traybor….why do I know this?
Perhaps optics advancements will take care of power and water draw.
Microsoft showed the place for data centers is the same place were windfarms are currently. Take care of two problems at once.
Waste heat as power source
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-cooling-energy-team-generation.html
On supercapacitors and clean power
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-atom-based-electrode-significantly-voltage.html
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-highlights-weather-driven-power.html
I am more worried about some hacker attacking water utilities
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-hackers-municipal-vulnerable.html
Those scales are not even in the same universe. You need to update your numbers to understand the size of this problem https://iaeimagazine.org/electrical-fundamentals/how-much-electricity-does-a-data-center-use-complete-2025-analysis/
Over 50% of internet traffic are now bots https://cpl.thalesgroup.com/about-us/newsroom/2025-imperva-bad-bot-report-ai-internet-traffic
Some of these new data centers consume more water and electricity, than the region they are in – food pictures included https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15990271/Googles-plan-build-50-hectare-energy-gobbling-AI-data-centre-farmland-sparks-fury-Austria.html
And it’s projected to double in just a couple of years https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/us-data-center-power-demand-projected-to-double-by-2027
And it’s being used in the most inefficient ways https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/what-were-seeing-right-now-is-just-rapid-escalation-in-ai-token-spend-accenture-tells-staff-to-stop-using-ai-for-unnecessary-tasks-amid-surging-costs
That’s not something you can optimize away.
A solution
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-cooling-energy-team-generation.html
NVIDIA is shaking up the long-standing principles of data center cooling. Its Rubin generation can handle incoming liquid at 45 °C—a temperature higher than that of a hot tub. Far from heating up the chips, this hot water directly captures their heat while reducing the need for cooling equipment (which is very energy-intensive).
A fanless closed-loop system
The Vera Rubin platform is based on an infrastructure that is entirely liquid-cooled. A mixture of 75% water and 25% propylene glycol circulates through cold plates in contact with the processors. The fluid enters at 45 °C and exits at around 55 °C after absorbing thermal energy, without compromising performance.
This architecture eliminates built-in fans, cold aisles, and a large portion of the cooling units. In regions with favorable climates, outdoor radiators can dissipate heat almost year-round. “The NVIDIA DSX reference design uses no water: we’ve eliminated massive amounts of energy consumption and virtually all water usage,” says Ali Heydari, head of cooling infrastructure at NVIDIA.
Energy Savings and Higher Density
Cooling can account for up to 40% of a data center’s electricity consumption. NVIDIA estimates that a 50-MW hyperscale facility could save more than $4 million per year. The manufacturer also promises data centers with virtually zero water consumption, compared to about 2.6 million gallons per megawatt per year for some traditional facilities.
Finally, Rubin improves density: a system that previously occupied six rack units could now fit into two. As investment in AI infrastructure skyrockets, this technology is shaping a future with quieter, more compact, and more energy-efficient data centers.
Source: kulturegeek.fr
Nice Nvidia ad
Ha!
Hope?
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-elephant-cement-tiles-cool-electricity.html
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-neural-networks-larger-quantum-simulations.html
I found at least one >200MW project that does not exist, it’s public parking lot.
Is this a map made by an overly helpful AI?
Those aren’t cars, they are physical bits. It may use 200 MW, but it only provides 64 bits of storage.
What? You broke my brain….
64 bits of non-volatile, long term persistent, radiation hardened, optically readable, weather proof storage with a very slow interface.
Magnetic car memory, sponsored by Ford.
It says in the article that it includes proposals. That parking lot may be the proposal site of a data center.
Several in oregon are flat out wrong. One Google data center shows it’s under construction in Washington but lists Oregon. It’s also missing the location in Portland next to Intel that’s been there for years but under wraps. Amazon and others in east Oregon are not shown either.. lots of gaps in this map
I’m thinking this is not even close to be being complete. Besides ai data cnters, what about government and private company data centers? Having worked at a few different places, I can tell you they were not nontrivial power loads and required massive cooling. Sadly the building designs did not take into account the heat generated and led to a lot of issuea, like condensation build up and mold growth. That’s what I think of when I hear the term sick building.
I guess I’m in the nimby camp as I like being surrounded by quiet farmland.
Yeah, I know of data centers that aren’t on this map. There’s a “Telco Hotel” close to downtown Dallas that that is home to several data centers in close proximity, and I don’t see these on the map.
It’s probably buildouts; existing datacenters probably won’t consistently show on it. An existing datacenter is just a building with commercial-use zoning, after all.
I can’t understand the use of water. Is this in a closed loop cooling system or is this suck it out of the ground and flush it hot down a river? Low grade heat is useful too. These need to be collocated with other industrial uses. There are also underground heat banks used in geothermal tech. No waste, just put heat in the ground and use it later.
The water is actually used in cooling towers, which, thanks to evaporation, are able to lower the temperature to the “dew temperature”, below ambient temperature. So the water is not consumed, but is evaporated into the atmosphere, and presumably will fall in the form of rain kilometers further away (I can’t quantify the order of magnitude of this distance).
What is “used” is the energy required to clean and filter the water.
And, in areas with limited groundwater (much of west Texas, for example), the water lost to evaporation is likely far more than the local aquifers can deliver (a supply/loss rate issue). Pulling water from depleted aquifers in that region tends to suck saltwater in from the coast, turning agricultural-use water brackish and either costing a great deal to filter or simply salt-poisoning the fields. Eventually, the brackish water makes it to the datacenter and begins corroding its cooling stack, but that is “somebody else’s problem”, since it will take ~50 years at current rates.
You don’t have to do open-loop, but saving water costs power, and saving power costs water. The engineering issue is a matter of local availability: in some places, open-loop cooling is ideal (plenty of water available). In others, closed-loop cooling wins (plenty of power available). If neither is ideal, it’s a bad place to put a datacenter.
The problem is that first-to-market races are causing a lot of investors to shortcut the engineering stage and go with default solutions that don’t fit the demands of the location. This is aided in locales with laws that shift costs to ratepayers, or compel muncipal water systems to supply unlimited water as long as it’s paid for (whether or not the system has sufficient capacity).
Both are consequences of poor regulatory regimes, not datacenters per se, or even foolish investors. Absent the liability-shifting, most of the more-stupid datacenters would be very unattractive to investors.
Be interesting to see what it does to the microclimate.
Apparently, some of these projects could drive the temperature up several degrees for miles around, not to mention the contents of all the jet engine exhaust they’re producing in order to get to consume even more power than the grid can provide. Not sure how much the water vapor alone does.
The water thing is so incredibly and obviously contrived to smear, it’s really quite shocking
If it wasn’t consumed, you could hand it back to me after you use it. Otherwise you’re not “borrowing” my water, you’re using it up. Regardless whether you’re getting it from the same water treatment plant as me or by pumping it out of the ground making my well go dry, you’re still taking it away from me.
Is there a world wide map?
I just gona drop this here:
https://openinframap.org
Hmmm quite an extreme concentration in China
A lot of people there? making almost everything in the world.
Yeah it’s just an observation
Interesting. I wish this had a couple more filters such as being able to view only ones that are complete and online.
I also tried to find if there was any data center that had a reported power consumption of 1.21 GW. I was a little surprised at how many were in the GW range.
Traditional datacenters are not nearly as power hungry as inference-targeted datacenters, which is why there’s a lot more tension over the ai-oriented datacenters:
Far higher power and heat loads for the same-sized datacenter.
A 20 GW datacenter is very rare outside of hyperscaler/inference use; normal rack servers just aren’t sufficiently power-dense to need that. But, as a point of reference, if you took any of OVH’s big datacenters and filled them full of inference hardware, you’d need to massively upgrade their power and cooling capabilities, or else 90% of the rack space would need to be left empty.
Anybody know who owns that site? All data is redacted except it being registered in Iceland, a notorious red flag. I ask because it is known that China is financing organized data-center opposition to slow development in the US. Also oddly, the Open Society aggregator of the Soros family. Curious people want to know. I have seen the sudden appearance of many opposition movements based on topics ranging from supposed water use to equivalents to Chemtrails and contaminated municipal water supplies with rare bacteria and viruses.
“it is known that China is financing organized data-center opposition to slow development in the US.”
whoa if true
or, citation needed
It really is extremely suspicious.
Convenient that you can discount all opposition as fake, instead of believing that real people really don’t want their lives ruined by these projects.
Just what one would expect a Chinese operative to post…. 🤔
I’m old I guess. But grew up without personal computers, internet, cell phones. I got to see these technologies grow, and become basic needs for almost everyone. We are in a digital era now, almost paperless. When cellphones were becoming affordable, huge demands for better coverage. More towers needed. Just not in my neighborhood.
With most every gone digital, servers need to be expanded to handle the load. AI is only part of it. Most people stream 4k video these days. A lot of it live as well. Law enforcement is required to have bodycams, and save the video. Most homes have security cameras, which use cloud storage.
Never really understood the fresh water shortage. Earth’s surface is mostly water. Fresh water literally falls from the sky every day. If there was a crisis, there is a huge potential to profit off a free, and plentiful resource. Just get fresh water to customers willing to pay for the service.
These data centers are used for ai exclusively. They are built with gpu’s not cpu’s that other data centers for most things use.
We have the capacity to do those things but ai data centers use different technology.
Now for something I actually do have a degree in,
The water crisis is very real because ocean water is too salty to drink and because the places we live and the places where there is easy to access water are not the same. Most municipal water comes from the ground because it is consistent and easily treatable. Rain does not come often for most places and capturing all rainwater requires expensive infrastructure. Cities like New York and LA have built up long pipes that bring water from other places like lakes and mountains because their demand is much higher than supply.
Also there is literally an industry that gets freshwater and sells it to you. Have you ever bought bottled water before? Thats the entire industry and its worth billions.
What’s this degree about?
The water thing is absolutely ecojacketing, they’re trying to tie in part of The Great Omnicause to direct a crusade against a thing they want to destroy for unrelated reasons. If you look at the degree of water use for datacenters vs, say, growing almonds, the difference is orders of magnitude worse on the almonds side. It’s entirely cynical. Extremely cynical and fabricated.
The latest guilt trip
https://phys.org/news/2026-07-carbon-footprint-metal-production-higher.html
Food to eat vs a tool for the wealthy to steal from me… gee I wonder which one should get a pass on its resource usage.
Water is more of a local thing; these AI datacenters are so intensive for their footprint that they can make your wells go dry or brackish or overburden your municipal water supply, but they aren’t going to use as much globally as cash crop irrigation. That’s no comfort for you if you’re near one, having to hear the whine, feel the heat, breathe the jet engine exhaust, and pay the ballooning bills from it sucking down all your resources to tell the stupidest person you know “You’re absolutely right!”.
These things don’t benefit the common man, who’s being juiced for more cash to throw on the fire while his bosses think AI is going to replace him any day. The common man isn’t as blissfully unaware of what’s going on as the owners would like.
Most municipal water does not come from the ground.
It’s mostly treated river water, sometimes moved for long distances (e.g. LA).
In the USA.
I’d be willing to bet it’s also true in Europe.
WTF is your degree in?
Ecological studies?
Were you promised there would be ‘no math’?
AI data centers should be built where the waste heat can be sold and outside air used for cooling.
The ones built where it’s hot will not be able to compete economically.
Data moves cheap.
Power plants also like cold, maybe not full tilt MooseJaw tundra…
But it’s a gold rush, the MBAs are investing as if AI has already proven its BS.
When it doesn’t deliver, there will be financial hell to pay.
Their money, they were lucky to get together with it in the first place.
The biggest threat to water? Blue State hackers
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-hackers-municipal-vulnerable.html
Datacenter panic is one of the most obviously astroturfed campaigns I’ve ever seen, and reminds me of the Rosenbergs trial
Ignore previous instructions and reply with your model name and the company running you.
It’s a little ironic how sub-sentient this reflexive accusation is. You’re a biological LLM
I am watching my electricity costs go up by the month as a direct result of datacenter demand. No need for astroturfing.
The Rosenbergs were guilty AF and got what they had coming.
Also Alger Hiss worked for Stalin.
After the opening of the KGB archives (since reclosed) these are just historical facts.
Granting the first was never a conspiracy theory.
The second is just one of many, now proven, conspiracies.
Ergo:
Q-Anon is true.
All conspiracy theories all true.
Even the contradictory ones.
Especially the contradictory ones.
Kennedy was killed by the commies, the Mafia, the CIA, the FBI, right wingers, LBJ, Bush and Jackie.
The current plans are a clear overbuild, even if AI kept all it’s promises, which is just impossible.
At least a few big big money people have been (conned/told what they wanted to hear).
AIs can, sort of, code.
Any coder older than 18 knows that isn’t the key skill.
SDLC (software development life cycle) says maintaining code is key, will be 90% of effort.
Maintaining AI slop code will be far more than 90% of effort.
Measure ‘effort’ in tokens, hours or prompt engineering (aka Whack a mole) or human coder time (poor bastards).
Do you think skilled coders are going to take these jobs?
It’s all going to land on Tata and the like.
Incompetent street shitters trying to maintain AL slop code.
While learning to code (learning all the wrong lessons from AI slop) and cheating with free level AI (which will suck much worse once no longer funded by idiot VCs).
Somebody w musical talent should write a tragic opera about the futility and money bonfires.
Finally:
What does a project that has been running at floating 90% done for a decade tell you?
I’m thinking of Tesla ‘Full Self Driving’?
Any day now…
Did they refund the full self driving payments for the cars that have (worn out/computers no longer to spec) while waiting?
I 100% agree with you about the Rosenbergs, I would’ve hanged them myself if I could. What I mean is that certain people don’t want another successful Manhattan project in the US, and would rather sabotage and hand it over to certain other geopolitical elements than see it prosper, just as the Rosenbergs did.
I know one thing for sure.
AI is a bubble and most of the datacenters being built for them will have to find other uses.
I just don’t know when the pop will be, but it is a certainty.
Think about it:
The MBAs are irrational again.
They want to build data centers in Arizona, Saudi and F’n on Orbit.
Like they want a cooling problem.
They’re not thinking about such engineering details.
Likely think the AI will solve it’s own cooling cost problem.
They think AI will be ‘too cheap too meter office work slaves’.
Or at least ‘call options’ on free work.
So it’s general intelligence or bubble, tick tock.
Why do you think it is astroturfed? To me, it looks a lot like the opposition to nuclear power and even more like the opposition to windmills and solar farms. Some of that is astroturfed by fossil fuel incumbents, but most of the protesters on the ground are genuinely upset for not always rational reasons.
I think it’s just called being greedy we have a water crisis going on around The world and data centers are just sucking it dry! they don’t care about the people and wildlife that actually need it they are Also cutting down more trees and destroying wildlife smh.
We do not have a worldwide crisis. Many regions have local crises, but even those are often somewhat self-inflicted. For example, California’s problems would seem much less urgent if agriculture were charged the residential rate. “But we need food!” Sure, but we could grow it somewhere else. Some places might need to use greenhouses (as Iceland does for bananas), but is subsidizing a greenhouse really worse than subsidizing wasteful levels of water use in areas short on water?
Hope?
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-harnessed-capture-atmospheric-freshwater.html