Photo by Stefano Petroni via Flickr
Seth Higgins: The internet has to live somewhere
Would you find it odd if People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, better known as PETA, held its organizational meetings in a slaughterhouse? I sure would. Yet those opposed to data centers are doing the online equivalent of just that.
To understand my point, in the last few months I’ve seen a growing trend on social media of individuals and groups using the internet to organize themselves in opposition to the construction of data centers. In some cases, groups have circulated online petitions opposing new data centers in their regions.
And what enables social media and online petitions, you may ask?
Well, data centers.
All this would be funny if it weren’t so dismaying. It is a bit like a fish complaining about water. And just as fish require water, online activity requires data, which must be processed, stored, and transmitted from somewhere.
As I’m sure you can tell, I find the strengthening opposition to data centers myopic. America already has more than 3,000 data centers. While the growth in AI has led to their proliferation, this is not a new industry or use of land. After all, the internet has been widely available since the 1990s.
If I seem unfair, I do want to give those opposed to data centers their due. Any land use, whether a tire factory, hospital, apartment complex, or supermarket, needs to be appropriately zoned to weigh competing goods within a community. People, such as those who like to do political organizing online, benefit from data centers. So, they should have access to the services they provide. But I can understand why a town wouldn’t want to construct one next to a daycare.
Residents understandably want their municipalities to have zoning codes that allow data centers to be constructed in the right areas and with characteristics that make their development less intrusive, such as adequate property setbacks and tree screening. Some want to go even further and prevent their construction altogether through exclusionary zoning.
Pennsylvania has a unique law that complicates this, known as the Fair Share Doctrine. Practically speaking, a blanket prohibition on data centers would invite legal scrutiny. As a result, the thousands of municipalities across the commonwealth should proactively develop specific zoning codes for data centers.
Another concern with data centers is the amount of electricity they use. This would be a non-issue if America developed sufficient nuclear electrical capacity decades ago. Unfortunately, policy mistakes are often felt years, if not decades, later. And since this never happened, this is a concern with data centers I am sympathetic to. But people aren’t about to give up their smartphones and Netflix, so policymakers need to come up with solutions.
Some complain that data centers do not create enough new jobs to justify their development within a given community. Most data centers in fact do not require many employees for day-to-day operations, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in data centers increased by 60% from 2016 to 2023. Data centers can also generate significant tax revenue for local governments over the course of their life.
Water use is another worry with data centers that gets raised regularly, but this one is less convincing in my view, especially in a water-rich state such as Pennsylvania. Data centers do in fact require a good deal of water to run cooling systems, but when compared to other uses, data centers are not the water hogs they are often made out to be. After all, how many people do you know who fret about the 1,800 gallons of water it took to produce their pound of ground beef? But when it comes to political discourse, particularly online, facts tend not to get in the way of impassioned arguments.
All that to say, data centers are here to stay, so instead of blind opposition, residents and lawmakers need to develop strategies for their sustainable construction and operation. And how do I know that they are here to stay? Because without data centers, those organizing against them online would have a much harder time doing so.
Seth Higgins is a native of Saint Marys, Pennsylvania. He currently resides in Philadelphia.
Seth,
Your article is rife with misguided analogies. Let’s make it easy for you, and start with scale:
1 MILLION seconds is 11.5 days (less than two weeks, easily fitting within a short vacation or project timeline.)
1 BILLION seconds is 31.7 years (This spans an entire generation, representing a significant portion of a human lifespan.)
1 TRILLION seconds is 31,688 Years (This is a span of time that goes back to the last Ice Age, long before modern civilization.)
Most of the thousands of existing US data centers for the internet are standard +/- 100,000 sq ft buildings, roughly the size of a single Target or grocery store. They use +/- 4 MW. The modern hyper-scale facilities are the “BILLION” example and are massive campuses spanning several hundred thousand square feet, housing tens of thousands of servers. (Like Fairless Hills under construction in PA.) They’ll use +/-100 MW and your PA utility bill will spike significantly and you’ll be crying about it soon like the people in Virginia currently are. The Utah “Stratos” Proposal is like the “TRILLION” example and is proposed to be a gargantuan 40,000-acre project that is larger than 2,000 Walmart stores combined. It will suck up 9,000 Megawatts (9 GW.) That is a completely different thing that what exists now. I don’t know if you meant to be misleading. The so-called “Fair Share Doctrine” doesn’t work as you described. Their is still a process that land developers need to work thru. Most municipalities already have a process to regulate EDUs (water consumption.) Did you get paid by someone to write your misleading article? If so, you should disclose that.