Bad for consumers, bad for the environment, 230+ groups say
More than 230 organizations across America have signed a letter calling for a moratorium on the construction of datacenters, claiming the current building boom represents a huge environmental and social threat.
The open letter [PDF], sent to members of the US Congress by campaign group Food & Water Watch, complains that the AI-driven wave of datacenter expansion is stoking demand for more energy, which in turn leads to further greenhouse gas emissions, straining water resources, and higher electricity prices for ordinary consumers across the country.
Organizations endorsing the letter collectively represent millions of citizens across all 50 US states, the group claims. It urges members of Congress to suspend the construction of new facilities until adequate regulations are enacted to protect communities and the environment from the damage it claims is already being inflicted.
Investment in datacenters has hit an all-time high, thanks mostly to the burgeoning requirements of training and serving AI. Analyst firm Omdia estimates global datacenter capex will top $657 billion by the end of 2025, almost double the figure of just two years ago, with the US dominating this spending.
In hotspots such as Virginia, hyperscale datacenter capacity is greater than the entire capacity of China or the whole of Europe, according to previous figures. This comes at a cost, as those facilities consumed nearly twice as much power in the second half of 2024 compared to the prior six months. Overall, datacenters' water consumption increased by almost two-thirds over the past five years.
Ordinary Americans will likely pay for all this extra power generating capacity and the grid infrastructure needed to carry it, with a report out last year warning that US consumers could face a 70 percent hike in their electricity bills by 2030.
In addition, it emerged last month that some states are keeping citizens in the dark about the subsidies they use to attract datacenter companies to their territory, which means many projects are being funded at the expense of taxpayers.
Even worse, all these new datacenters are causing greater greenhouse gas emissions, with hyperscale operators such as Microsoft and Google admitting their emissions have risen over the past several years, in spite of their commitments to reach net-zero by the end of the decade.
The demand for power has spurred a resurgence in coal-fired power generation, one of the dirtiest, most polluting ways of producing electricity. And datacenters generating their own energy on-site are also contributing to the problem, as demonstrated by the Colossus facility run by Elon Musk's xAI, which was accused of being one of the largest sources of smog-generating nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the Memphis area thanks to its fleet of gas turbines.
"At a time when millions of Americans are already struggling with soaring utility costs, the sudden explosion of the Big Data industry represents an existential threat for communities ill-equipped to handle the massive environmental and economic hardships these datacenters inflict," stated Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter.
"The only prudent action is to halt the unfettered expansion of this dangerous industry in order to properly examine all manner of potential harm before it's too late," she added.
Good luck with that.
As far as the Trump administration is concerned, the US is in a race with China for AI supremacy, and it can only win by investing more in compute muscle to underpin AI development.
US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum went as far to claim that: "The real existential threat right now is not a degree of climate change. It's the fact that we could lose the [AI] arms race if we don't have enough power."
Trump himself pledged to remove obstacles to connecting datacenters to the electricity grid at the federal level during a White House dinner held for tech industry oligarchs in September. And AI investment is the only thing keeping the America out of a recession right now, as economists disclosed in October.
The datacenter industry is aware that it isn't entirely loved, as was revealed at an industry event in June. A Microsoft exec complained there are "communities that don't want us there.".
The consensus was not that the industry needs to change, more that the public should be better informed about what datacenters actually do and the applications and industries which depend upon them. The industry should get people to think of bit barns as vital utilities, like water and electricity. ®