I work on data center projects for a living, so I hear the complaints a lot. They use too much power. They use too much water. They’re ugly. Nobody asked for them. Every few weeks there’s a new headline about a town pushing back against one being built nearby.
Some of those concerns are fair, and I’ll get to them. But I’ve noticed something about the people complaining. A lot of them are posting those complaints from their phones.
Here’s the thing most people don’t realize. Data centers aren’t new. They’ve been around for decades. Every time you’ve sent an email, checked your bank account, streamed a show, or looked at a map, a data center somewhere made that happen. Your photos backing up to the cloud? That “cloud” is a building full of servers, cooling systems, and a lot of electrical gear. It’s not floating anywhere.
What’s changed is the size. AI, streaming, and the sheer number of devices we all own (I wrote about my own collection recently) have pushed demand way up. The buildings got bigger, and now they’re showing up in places people actually notice, like right off the highway near their house.
So people see a massive building go up and assume it’s something being done to them. In reality, it’s something being built for them, whether they think about it that way or not.
I get frustrated when the conversation turns into “we don’t need these.” We need them more than ever. Hospitals rely on them for records and imaging. Banks run on them. Schools, emergency services, small businesses, and pretty much every app on your phone depend on them. If every data center shut off tomorrow, most of modern life would stop with it.
If you truly don’t want data centers, the honest move is to throw your phone away. Cancel your streaming services. Stop using online banking. Delete your email. Most people aren’t willing to do that, and I don’t blame them. I’m not either.
That said, I don’t think people are wrong to ask questions. These sites do use a lot of power and, depending on the design, a lot of water. Communities deserve to know how a project will affect their utility bills, their roads, and their environment. Companies should be upfront about that, and the good ones are working on it with things like closed-loop cooling, renewable energy, and better efficiency.
Those are the right conversations to have. “How do we build these responsibly?” is a much better question than “why do these exist?”
From the inside, I can tell you a lot of people care about getting it right. There are engineers, electricians, and project teams working long hours to make these buildings safer, cleaner, and more efficient. It’s not a faceless machine. It’s a lot of people trying to keep everything you use every day running.
So the next time you see a data center going up, it’s fine to ask hard questions. Just remember it’s probably the reason you’re able to read this right now.