My 17-year-old daughter came down the stairs yesterday in a panic. This is not all that uncommon. She is a very anxious person, but she saw several videos about data centers. 

She said they talked about how bad it is for the environment and how unhealthy they can be for the population that lives nearby.

 

To be honest, I haven't paid that close of attention to the situation. The full plate of political information I am thinking about is already overwhelming. Prioritizing which article to work on and determining which story goes to the top of the pile is always a challenge for me.

 

I should have probably looked into this topic sooner, but it somehow always got pushed aside.

 

Well, yesterday I got a big wake-up call, because, of course, it may directly impact me and my family.

 

There is a two-billion-dollar proposal for a data center that would sit about 5 miles from my home. The data center is expected to use 300 megawatts of electricity to get started.

 

With my town being so close to Canada, we are already suffering from electricity rate increases monthly from fifty to one hundred dollars per month. This is without the use of air conditioning for my home during the summer months. The increase is due to the tariffs that Trump decided to put on Canada during “liberation day.”

 

In addition to this, the construction of this data center will come out of my tax dollars. So in essence we are paying this AI data center company to pollute our environment and raise our electric bill. I do not really see the benefit here.

 

I also wanted to mention that the site of this mass pollution machine will sit on a 140-acre site that was shut down due to the former business failing to adhere to environmental standards back in 2018.

 

Essentially the proposed plan would mitigate whatever environmental damage that was done, only to then further damage the area in a new way with the proposed data center. A water source just so happens to sit about a football field away from the Niagara River so it can just burn and contaminate one of our main freshwater resources.

 

While digging into the potential harm that an operation like this could cause, I ran across this article that says that

 

“Even putting aside the environmental toll of chip manufacturing and supply chains, the training process for a single AI model, such as a large language model, can consume thousands of megawatt hours of electricity and emit hundreds of tons of carbon. This is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of hundreds of households in America. Furthermore, AI model training can lead to the evaporation of an astonishing amount of fresh water into the atmosphere for data center heat rejection, potentially exacerbating stress on our already limited freshwater resources.”

 

So not only are we emitting hundreds of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, but we are also evaporating tons of fresh water. And this is to just get one LLM off the ground.

 

“All these environmental impacts are expected to escalate considerably, with the global AI energy demand projected to exponentially increase to at least 10 times the current level and exceed the annual electricity consumption of a small country like Belgium by 2026.”

 

Yet again this is the result of Project 2025 and the dismantling of government regulations that could curb these irresponsible uses of energy because Russell Vought finds caring for the environment is too “woke.”

 

Just for a little perspective, a midsize data center requires enough fresh water for a small town every day, while a large data center can require up to 5 million gallons per day!

 

An AI data center also requires a crazy amount of electricity. The one that would run just 5 miles away from my house would take enough electricity to power up to 100,000 homes!

 

For a sense of scale, there is a data center in Louisiana that requires double the amount of electricity as the entire city of New Orleans.

 

“A study by the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) and University of Houston found that data centers in Texas will use 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, and as much as 399 billion gallons in 2030. That would be equivalent to drawing down the largest reservoir in the US—157,000-acre Lake Mead—by more than 16 feet in a year.”

 

That will make everyone’s electricity cost go through the roof. These things are environmental monsters, and they once again impact people in the lower socio-economic classes because access to freshwater won't be as available. 

 

And for those that are saying it will bring jobs to the area, it's a temporary gig. The jobs that these would provide would be mostly for construction, which ends when the facility is built. Operating a data center does not take a whole lot of people to run, which would take between 100 and 150 people. 

 

So next time you use ChatGPT, remember that for every 20 queries you make, it takes roughly one bottle of purified water, which also takes energy to purify.

 

There must be pushback on these things. We are already under so much pressure, and I hate to add this to the heap, but it is vital that we acknowledge and resist the building of these facilities.

 

The trade-off for having your questions answered conveniently. Or listening to AI-generated music on YouTube or writing an article on Substack—if that's what you do, perhaps try not to take the easy way and come up with your own material. (I know most of you do your own work.)

 

The amount of damage that these things are already causing is very unnerving. I would have never known how incredibly damaging these data centers were if not for my 17-year-old ringing the alarm bell.

 

We need to go to bat for our kids’ future. If we allow these things to just run amok, clean air and fresh water will become more and more difficult to obtain. I don't think it’s worth jeopardizing our children's future just so we can use a chat bot.

 

Let's get clear-eyed about this and make sure that our local governments realize the huge impact it could have on our way of life.