The Joys of Data Centers: Debunking the Backlash Against the $7 Trillion AI Building Boom

Sen. Bernie Sanders has a problem with data centers. They're just too good.

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In a video posted to social media in December 2025, the Vermont independent complained that billionaire tech moguls are reaping huge profits from their data center investments while the technological innovations these facilities power will automate away countless jobs currently done by human workers. He called for a federal moratorium on data center construction to "give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing."

By 2030, companies are projected to invest as much as $7 trillion on building or updating the boxy, server-filled facilities that keep the digital cloud aloft and train large language models to speak intelligibly. About 40 percent of that spending will happen in America.

Sanders is hardly alone in complaining about America's staggering data center boom.

As 770 data centers enter the development pipeline, a chorus of usual suspects is demanding they be stopped. Environmentalists complain that they are gobbling up virgin land and drinking all of the water. Preservationists say these boxy facilities are ruining the character of local areas. Consumer advocates say their power demands are raising everyone's electricity bills.

In Sanders' case, his complaints about data centers tacitly accept the premises of the people investing huge sums in them: that these facilities will be fabulously profitable investments that spur the development of the innovative, labor-saving technologies of the future. But the socialist senator thinks that's a bad thing. After all, no government bureaucrat has precisely planned where all this economic dynamism will take us.

The rest of us should be able to see the tremendous upsides of the country's data center boom. Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics could liberate humanity from boring, backbreaking labor. The early profits of data center development are a leading indicator of the increasingly productive economy that awaits us in the years to come.

While the rest of the economy wobbles under the weight of trade wars and other forms of government intervention, data center investment is almost exclusively responsible for driving GDP growth.

Contrary to the claims of the not-in-my-backyard technophobes, all this growth comes with minimal environmental downsides. Data centers consume a tiny portion of the nation's water. While they're not the prettiest buildings to look at, they mean less noise, fumes, and traffic than almost any other land use one could care to name.

Their power consumption is gargantuan. But data centers' electricity demands are also driving secondary innovations in the world of energy efficiency and power generation.

In short, it's hard to imagine an industry that gets more juice from the olives it squeezes. Data centers are the silent, uncomplaining Atlas holding our dynamic, tech-driven economy on his mighty shoulders. They don't produce rainbows (yet). But they might as well. We should all stop worrying and learn to love them.

Building Boom and Backlash

The internet isn't a series of tubes. It's a series of warehouses filled with computing equipment in Loudoun County, Virginia.

The suburban jurisdiction just outside the Washington Beltway is home to 200 data center facilities with a physical footprint of 47 million square feet. The wider Northern Virginia region hosts some 13 percent of the entire world's data center capacity, supporting a huge percentage of global internet activity. When Amazon Web Services' data centers in the area experienced a brief disruption in late 2025, everything from Venmo to the British government's tax services went down.

It's fashionable to complain that America is a "build nothing" country. Loudoun County shows how much matter we can add to meatspace when the law allows it.

In 2000, the county's zoning administrator decided to treat data centers as though they were office buildings, meaning they could be built by-right (i.e., without the need for approval from elected officials) in large swaths of the county. That decision made a lot of sense. Data centers are, after all, effectively just office buildings with more computers and fewer windows.

The subsequent boom in data center construction beggars belief.

As an October 2025 county report states, "The rate of data center growth in Loudoun County over the past 20 years has been among the highest of any community in the world, and that rate has accelerated exponentially since 2022." From 2016 through 2020, data centers' square footage in Loudoun more than doubled. From 2020 to 2025, it more than doubled again to today's nearly 50 million square feet. Another 117 new data centers are currently planned to be built in the county.

Predictably, the ground zero of America's data center boom is now the epicenter of the backlash to them. In March 2025, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors voted to revoke data centers' by-right status in the zoning code. Going forward, new data centers will need individual approval from the Board of Supervisors. (The new rules grandfather in many of the pending data center proposals filed under the old rules.)

It's understandable why people would rather live next to an open field or a single-family home than a data center. Yet the voluminous press coverage of property owners' complaints about these facilities reveals just how low-impact such centers are, particularly in the context of their overall economic importance.

Neighbors complain that data centers are unsightly. Their white concrete walls produce a glare. The low, constant hum of their generators and cooling equipment, while well within existing noise limits, can annoy human beings and scare away birds. (The hum is anywhere between 40 and 59 decibels, which is a little louder than a library and a little quieter than a pickleball court.)

Anti-growth activists often complain that new residential development generates traffic, strains local schools, and sucks up resources from local budgets. Data centers do not. McKinsey & Company notes in a research brief that large data centers have around 50 permanent workers. These relatively small staffs mean their impacts on roads and schools are minimal.

"My standing joke about data centers is they're a very big building with a very small parking lot," Shane Greenstein, a Harvard professor who studies data centers, told Inside Climate News last year.

Despite the targeted local tax breaks that data centers received, they pay for about 30 percent of Loudoun's local budget. Perhaps there's a case for regulations to mitigate some of the centers' externalities, but they are not smoke-belching factories. Yet data center critics are increasingly winning the local land-use battles. Heatmap News reports that 25 data centers were scrubbed nationwide in response to local opposition in 2025, four times as many as were canceled in 2024. That's evidence of both the demand for more data centers and the regulatory obstacles they're up against.

As the neighbors come out against data centers, people with more global concerns are trying to block them as well.

Power Thirsty

If you were simply reading the headlines, you'd assume that data centers were drinking up most of America's water and polluting whatever they leave behind. That couldn't be further from the truth. Individual facilities are, all things considered, modest drinkers.

"Most data centers use about the same amount of water or less than an average large office building, although a few require substantially more, and some require less than a typical household," notes a research report prepared by the Virginia General Assembly's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. These facilities consume water in two ways: directly, as a means of cooling their equipment, and indirectly, via the water used in generating the power they consume.

Neither makes much of a dent in America's fresh water supply. Data centers' water consumption is a tiny portion of overall U.S. water usage.

Data centers directly consumed 46 million gallons a day in 2023, according to a report produced by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Their indirect consumption from the power plants serving them added another 576 million gallons of water consumed daily, for a combined daily total of 625 million.

That's a lot of water. It's also a very small percentage (0.2 percent) of the 322 billion gallons of water that the United States consumes each day.

California's almond industry consumes almost 4.2 billion gallons of water a day, according to the California Water Impact Network. The country's golf courses consume another 1.4 billion gallons a day.

People can, and do, debate the merits of the amount of water that goes to almond milk and putting greens. But neither golf nor almonds were responsible for effectively all of U.S. economic growth this past year.

And the Lawrence Berkeley lab's estimate of data centers using 625 million gallons a day might be an overshot. That figure includes water lost to evaporation from the reservoirs that store water used by hydroelectric power plants, as the engineer Brian Potter has noted in his Construction Physics newsletter. Potter argues that while dams and reservoirs lead to additional evaporation, they also make additional fresh water available for use in drier seasons. That evaporation will also occur regardless of whether reservoir water is used to generate power.

If you exclude that from data centers' consumption, their combined water use falls to a lowly 250 million gallons a day. Despite the panic about the industry's water usage, that's really just a drop in the bucket.

Shocking Consumption

Data centers do use lots of electricity. Existing facilities consume 4 percent of the nation's electricity, and U.S. government estimates predict their share of power usage will hit as high as 12 percent by 2028.

This creates a challenge both for data center operators themselves and for the utility companies that supply them. It has also invited a lot of off-base and bad-faith criticism from data center haters.

Senate Democrats, led by Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), say data centers are raising everyday consumers' electricity bills. There is some truth to that: Higher demand and stagnant supply will, all else being equal, lead to higher prices. Yet all else isn't equal. Where they're allowed, data center owners are bankrolling the expansion of electrical generation capacity, which often benefits consumers through lower prices.

"States with higher electricity demand growth generally experienced smaller increases in retail prices," the energy industry analyst Marc Oestreich recently noted in Reason. "In some cases, prices declined outright."

In fact, data centers are ideal customers for utility grids because their power consumption is predictable and steady. Their demand doesn't surge on hot days, as when everyone in an apartment building turns on their air conditioners. This is why utility companies with power to spare often actively court data centers to move into the areas they serve.

More often than not, the obstacles to supplying data centers' power demands are political, not economic.

Voluminous state and federal regulations can make it difficult to build new power plants, sources of renewable energy, and transmission lines. A key component of the much-in-vogue "abundance agenda" is making it easier to do these things.

If Warren is worried about data centers driving up electricity prices, she should tell the Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and all the other environmental groups she normally agrees with to quit filing lawsuits that attempt to stop new power generation capacity.

Meanwhile, data center companies' demand is also pushing out the innovative frontier of power generation.

In the past few years, startups like Last Energy have attempted to revolutionize the nuclear power industry by designing and building modular nuclear reactors that can serve as a dedicated, emissionless source of off-grid power for data centers.

Another company, Deep Fission, plans on installing small nuclear reactors at the bottom of deep, narrow tunnels, where the free bedrock can serve the same function as expensive surface containment buildings.

These efforts are in their early days. A major barrier to fast rollout is—surprise—federal regulation. Licensing applications run more than 10,000 pages, and annual reactor operating fees can cost millions of dollars.

If We Let Them

Sanders' demand for a federal moratorium on data centers is radical. It's also unpopular. Many liberal Democrats declined to endorse it. When asked by Politico about Sanders' moratorium proposal, even Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D–Texas) said artificial intelligence could " bring real economic opportunity to Texas."

Voters themselves aren't too agitated about data centers one way or another. When polled by Navigator Research in December 2025, 58 percent of respondents said they'd heard either a little or nothing about new data center construction. Most respondents did not have clear views on whether data centers are good or bad.

Even so, a data center moratorium wouldn't be an entirely unprecedented intrusion of federal regulation into local land-use decisions.

The federal 1996 Telecommunications Act preempted local governments' ability to use their zoning codes to block cellphone towers. Without that top-down deregulation, much of the modern information economy probably would not exist today.

Sanders' call for a nationwide moratorium does make one wonder if we still have it in us to keep government out of the way of new and dynamic industries.

Peter Thiel's famous quip that we wanted flying cars but got 140 characters—a reference to Twitter's original character limit per post—was meant to highlight how the tech economy had exploded while our ability to improve the physical world had stagnated. The fight over data centers illustrates that this is a false dichotomy. We need computing equipment for AI to detect cancer early, write your emails, decode scrolls charred by Mount Vesuvius, help you plan dinner, guide driverless cars, and so much more. That computing equipment needs to live somewhere. That somewhere is data centers.

Contra their critics, big boxy buildings with servers inside produce vanishingly few externalities. Their water consumption is modest, their emissions are negligible, and their aesthetic merits are a matter of personal taste. Their power demands are considerable, but also eminently serviceable.

On the other side of the ledger, their economic benefits are hard to overstate. A bright future of AI-supported innovations in safety, health, and convenience is only realizable if we get out of the way of data center construction.

The question isn't whether data centers are a good thing. It's whether we'll let them be good at scale.

We don't know the answer to that question. There are certainly powerful forces arrayed behind data centers' steady expansion.

Large tech companies obviously view them as profitable investments. The Trump administration's interest in winning the "AI race" with China has seen it issue a number of executive orders that attempt to ease the regulatory burden on the industry. But tech is not particularly popular on the left or the right. People's irritation at their own smartphone use has snowballed into a wider bipartisan assault on the industry. In this environment, overheated worries about data centers' water and power bills are just another excuse to beat up on the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezoses of the world.

The same zoning laws that dictate whether homeowners can add a pool house or open a home-based business also give the neighbors an effective veto over new data centers and the techno-optimist future they power. When it comes to questions of who's allowed to build what and where, the real enemies of the future are often local planning boards who don't trouble themselves with global concerns.

It needn't be this way. Data centers will do good things for us, if only we'd let them.

The post The Joys of Data Centers: Debunking the Backlash Against the $7 Trillion AI Building Boom appeared first on Reason.com.

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