A Straight forward Look at the Concerns, the Context, and the Facts of Data Centers

 Setting the Stage

A complex conversation deserves complete information

The debate over data centers is getting louder, but the facts aren’t keeping pace.
Most people have never thought about data centers. Yet, they’ve thought about their email, their bank accounts, their Netflix queue, the 911 call that saved a neighbor’s life, and whether their paycheck clears on time. Every transaction, every text, every emergency call, even the basic infrastructure that we take for granted in our daily lives, and all of it runs through a data center.
Hardly a week passes without a new round of headlines: communities pushing back on zoning approvals, politicians making data centers a campaign issue, and local news stories warning about power grids and water supplies. In many cases, these concerns are spreading faster than the facts behind them.
Here’s the reality: Yes, data centers use energy and resources. So does every hospital, office building, and shopping center. The difference is that data centers are the backbone of our modern digital lives — and all of us are demanding more every day.
The goal here isn’t to score points or assign blame. The overall landscape is changing faster than anyone anticipated, and the questions communities are asking deserve more than talking points. This is a complex moment for everyone involved, including utilities, regulators, legislators, operators, and the neighborhoods where this infrastructure lives.
We want to put honest, accurate information on the table and work through it together.

 IF DATA CENTERS GO DARK

What Would Hapen ?

• 911 dispatch and emergency routing would be compromised • Pharmacies could not fill prescriptions
• Medical devices and monitoring systems would go offline
• Power grid monitoring and load balancing systems would be impaired
• Water treatment and distribution systems could lose automation  • Utility outage reporting systems would be unavailable
• Flights would be grounded  • GPS navigation systems would become unreliable or unusable
• Traffic management systems (smart signals) could fail • Gas station pumps would not function
• Rideshare services (Uber, Lyft) would stop operating • Grocery and retail supply chains would stop communicating
• Credit and debit card transactions would fail (in-store and online), and ATMs would be unavailable
• Payroll processing would stop • Tax systems and benefit disbursements could pause
• Automatic bill payments and banking would stop • Email systems would go offline
• Stock markets and trading platforms would halt  • Cloud-based collaboration tools (Teams, Slack, etc.) would fail
• Online education platforms would go offline   • Home security systems would go dark

•  Social media platforms would be inaccessible   • Streaming services (TV, music) would not work

A Day Without Data Centers

Imagine every data center goes quiet for 24 hours.

Not a disaster.

Not an attack.

Just an experiment for one day.

Your alarm doesn’t go off. Your commute navigation goes dark. The coffee app won’t load. Traffic lights aren’t working. At the office, the shared documents are inaccessible, the video call won’t connect, and cash is suddenly everyone’s only option at lunch.
Hospitals must work from paper. Flights are grounded. The 911 dispatch system is running on backup protocols. Your bank app is offline, and so is everyone else’s.
By dinner, the streaming services are unavailable, the food delivery app is down, and your smart home has forgotten everything it knows about you.
Twenty-four hours. That’s all it takes to see something clearly: Data centers don’t exist to consume resources. They exist because we consume services. Every single day. Every one of us.

Largest in the United States. 315 acres

Your Digital Day, Powered by Data Centers

Every tap, swipe, and transaction

you make runs through one

The alarm on your phone goes off. Data center. You check the weather. Data center. You scroll through the news, fire off a few emails, and order coffee through an app on your way out the door. Data center. Data center. Data center.
On your commute, your navigation reroutes you to avoid an accident in real time. At the office, you jump on a video call, pull up a shared document, and process an invoice. You grab lunch and pay with your phone. Data center. Data center. Data center. Data center.
On the way home, you stream a podcast. Your kid’s school sends an alert through its parent app. You check your bank balance, order dinner, and settle in for a show. Your smart thermostat adjusts the temperature before you even think about it.
Somewhere across town, a hospital is pulling up patient records. A bank is processing thousands of transactions. A 911 dispatcher is routing emergency calls. None of it works without the same infrastructure running quietly in a data center.
By the time you fall asleep scrolling through social media, you’ve touched data center infrastructure thousands of times without thinking about it once.

Understanding how data centers consume  the energy that keeps the digital world running

Data centers consume energy to run the applications and services that businesses and consumers depend on to operate. Hospitals managing patient records. Utility providers managing community power and water. Banks processing transactions. Schools managing parent and student communications. Retailers running e-commerce platforms. Streaming services delivering entertainment to millions. Social media platforms connecting billions of users worldwide. These aren’t frivolous applications. They’re how modern organizations serve their customers and communities.

Those organizations put their infrastructure in data centers because that’s where the computational power, cooling, and security are built to operate at scale. Who uses those services? You do. Everyone does.

The business model varies by market. In regulated states, data centers pay standard commercial or industrial rates set by utilities. In deregulated markets, they negotiate rates competitively. Either way, they pay for what they use, and the relationship between large commercial loads and residential rates is more nuanced than most headlines suggest.

Check out how people are using

DATA CENTERS

Most people know the everyday story of data centers: the emails, streaming queues, or navigation apps running quietly in the background. Yet, that’s only part of what’s happening inside them.

Not All Data Centers Are the Same

SEVEN DIFFERENT TYPES

When communities debate data centers, they often picture the same thing: a massive, power-hungry industrial facility with little regard for its surroundings. The reality is considerably more varied.

Data centers range from the hyperscale campuses built by global technology companies to handle billions of daily interactions to the smaller, specialized facilities.

Understanding the differences matters

The Water Conversation

The facts are more assuring than the headlines suggest.

The Distinction That Changes the Whole Conversation

Not all cooling systems use water the same way Water consumption is one of the most contentious concerns about data centers. It’s also one where a single technical distinction tends to get lost in the coverage.

There are three fundamentally different approaches to cooling a data center:

1 Air-based cooling uses no water at all, relying entirely on traditional air conditioning to manage heat. It’s a common approach in older and smaller facilities, although it is less practical as computing density increases.

2 Evaporative cooling systems dissipate heat by evaporating water. It’s a continuous process; water goes in and doesn’t come back. Many older, large-scale facilities use this approach and achieve impressive energy efficiency ratings as a result. The tradeoff is water consumption; a consideration critics and communities are right to raise.

3 Modern facilities increasingly use closed-loop cooling systems, which work on an entirely different principle. Water circulates continuously within a contained system. It isn’t released or consumed. It just moves. Some systems use glycol-based fluids instead of water. However, closed-loop systems can require more power than evaporative cooling, which is why the choice involves real engineering considerations.
The industry measures water efficiency through Weater Usag Effectiveness

Effectiveness (WUE). In a closed-loop system, once operational, Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE). In a closed-loop system, once operational, the WUE approaches zero.

 Not All Water Figures Are Created Equal

The methodology behind a water figure matters as much as the figure itself

Water usage figures for data centers get cited constantly. What rarely gets mentioned is what those figures actually include, and that distinction matters more than most people realize. When evaluating a data center’s water footprint, where exactly do you draw the line? Consider what else could reasonably be included:

• Cooling system water only
• Landscaping
• Employee restroom usage
• Water used during construction
• Water used to generate the electricity powering the facility

Each of those boundaries produces a very different number. A headline citing data center water consumption without specifying the methodology isn’t giving you information. It’s giving you a figure that can mean almost anything.

A Drop in the Bucket

Water consumption figures for data centers look large in isolation.

In context, they tell a different story..

1%
Data centers consumed an estimated 625 million gallons per day in 2023 — less than 1% of total U.S. daily water use.

1.3T vs.17B
California’s almond industry uses more than 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually, compared to roughly 17 billion gallons used by all U.S. data centers combined.

531 billion
U.S. golf courses collectively used approximately 531 billion gallons of water in 2024 — more than 30 times the direct cooling water used by all U.S. data centers combined.

Closed-loop or air-cooled facilities use no more water than a large office building, and some use less than a typical household.

 The Industry Is Moving in the Right Direction

Cooling technology is changing fast. The water story is changing with it.

The move away from evaporative cooling toward closed-loop and liquid cooling systems is underway, and it’s accelerating faster than most people outside the industry realize.

About 22% of data centers worldwide currently use liquid cooling technologies…27 That figure is expected to approach 50% of new hyperscale builds within two to three years, driven largely by the demands of high-density AI workloads, which generate more heat and require more precise thermal management than traditional computing infrastructure…28
Major operators have made firm commitments in this direction. Microsoft has announced zero-water closed-loop cooling for all future builds…29 DataBank’s standard facility design uses closed-loop cooling systems, meaning new builds enter service with a near-zero ongoing water footprint for cooling from day one.

There’s another dimension to the water conversation that rarely makes headlines. Fossil fuel power generation is highly water-intensive, while wind and solar consume virtually none. As data centers drive the adoption of more renewable energy sources, their indirect water footprint shrinks alongside their carbon footprint — a benefit that is real but rarely reflected in the figures critics cite.

Communities in drought-prone regions have legitimate concerns, and those concerns extend beyond cooling water to the water used in electricity generation. Not all data centers are moving at the same pace on these issues, which is exactly why DataBank’s commitment to closed-loop cooling and renewable energy matters. The honest answer is that progress is real, and we want to be specific about what that looks like in our facilities.

Data Centers Don’t Appear Without Warning

Communities have more say than most people realize

The resistance many communities feel toward data center development is understandable. When a large industrial facility is proposed nearby, people worry about noise, traffic, visual impact, environmental concerns including air and water quality, and strain on local services. Those concerns deserve a straight answer.

Data centers don’t arrive unannounced

Two concerns worth addressing directly:

Once operational, a data center generates far less vehicle activity than most industrial facilities of comparable size. Shift changes, delivery trucks, and loading dock activity exist but are minimal compared to warehouses or manufacturing facilities of similar scale.

Data centers create fewer permanent positions than a factory or distribution center, but those roles tend to be well-paying technical and operations jobs. Beyond direct employment, each facility supports a larger ecosystem of local contractors, vendors, service providers, and customers’ employees who work on site, making the direct headcount an incomplete measure of total economic impact.

The jobs created are high-quality ones: engineering, operations, security, and technical roles with above-average wages and real career paths. Research shows that every data center job supports six additional jobs in the larger local economy through indirect and induced employment…

The Culpeper Model

Culpeper, Virginia

The answer was the Culpeper Tech Zone (CTZ); a designated area within the county where data center development is welcome, encouraged, and concentrated. Rather than allowing facilities to scatter across the landscape, the community drew a line. Data centers belong in the zone. Everything outside stays the way it is.

The results now speak for themselves. Tax revenue, jobs, and economic activity have followed the investment, while the open space, rural landscape, and quality of life that residents wanted to protect have remained intact.

The framework also includes requirements for local business engagement, STEM education programs, and workforce development initiatives that extend the benefit beyond the facility fence line and into the broader community.

The Conversation Worth Having The concerns are real, yet so is the progress