Tech companies are hungry for the massive computing capacity required to support AI. But their ambitions to build huge data centers around the country, including a lot of them here in Texas, are creating a PR problem — data centers make people mad.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are talking about moratoriums, and citizens are crowding town meetings to express their anger about facilities that are expected to consume lots of power and water, and often emit a lot of noise.
Tech expert Omar Gallaga says traditional divides over economic development versus community preservation don’t map neatly onto political sides, where data centers are concerned.
Highlights from this segment:
– The speed at which data centers are spreading has worried many citizens, who don’t want them as neighbors.
– Texas is on track to become home to the second-largest number of data centers in the country.
– Politicians’ wariness of data centers crosses party lines, in response to constituents who are especially opposed to data centers. In conservative West Texas, Amazon plans a massive data center that is projected to become the largest source of pollution in the U.S.
