A populist campaign has built up around data centers and their impact on rural areas but, like with claims that natural gas and coffee cause cancer, they are lawyer-driven rather than scientific.
There are already 4,283 data centers in the lower 48 states and they are right where environmentalists want everyone to be - in cities. The cloud lives downtown.
Environmentalists want dense housing because they believe it will reduce emissions by being more efficient. For no reason anyone can understand, environmentalists refuse to criticize China, even though it emits more pollution than the rest of the top 10 countries combined (1) but they criticize American non-stop. You can't sue a communist dictatorship, China bans it, so lawyers go where the easy money is.
And the easy money is in promoting concern about data centers so they can sue. Yet it will be a challenge to show that the earth is going to deflate due to water usage or energy prices will skyrocket because it hasn't happened yet, and most data centers are in cities where environmentalists want humanity bottled up.
Energy prices have gone up, in technology hotbeds like California, but that is only because the state controls utilities and forced the companies they allow to exist (PG&E, SMUD, etc.) to subsidize solar and wind. Solar net metering and subsidies and government mandates are why California electricity prices have gone up 100% since a decade ago, not data centers. Water usage has also not been impacted in Silicon Valley or the government would not have stalled adding water storage that voters passed around the do-nothing legislature in 2014. Almonds in the arid California climate are more of a water concern than data centers.
A new analysis shows nearly 98 percent of data centers are in cities and the average of the tiny minority not in cities is 8 miles away.
So one group of environmentalists don't want data centers in remote areas at all while another group says companies are lying when they say data centers will mean jobs in remote areas impacted by the departure of heavy industry and coal and such that unions and activists ran out of existence.
Data centers are in cities for the same reason that solar can never come close to matching nuclear and natural gas; the effort to build the grid is high, even without the inevitable environmental lawsuits. To even come close to getting enough solar for it to compete, we'd need to build power lines equal in distance to every paved road in the country.
The footprint to generate 1 TWh/year of green energy using actual science compared to using political science.
A coal plant run out of business in California already has the grid in place. That makes it a good location for a data center and predatorts can't shake down companies for settlements if the power lines are already there. California is willing to charge poor people who rent a lot more so rich people in Malibu with panels on their mansions can get free electricity, so politicians turn a blind eye to energy cost when San Francisco is only being propped up by high-paying AI tech jobs.
And it is all due to the Biden administration. The war on coal meant plant closures so in 2022 he designated areas where jobs disappeared as Energy Communities that get clean energy subsidies. Governments use those subsidies to recruit tech jobs, while pretending they care about water and energy cost.
Citation: Camilla Ancona, Ofek Lauber Bonomo, Anton Rozhkov & Maurizio Porfiri. Urban infrastructure and fossil fuel industrial legacy drive US data center siting. Nat Cities (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44284-026-00487-z
NOTE:
(1) Both Russia and China have long funded groups that seek to undermine America in their chief exports, food and energy, so they use offshore donor-advised funds (Tides Foundation, etc.) to make dark-money contributions. While the environmental groups pretend they don't know where the money is coming from.
