Data centers coming to a town near you

 

You may think of your personal data as a digital asset, but it does have a physical home.  It exists in a data center (or multiple data centers) at rest.  As you’ve read in the press, tech companies are building data centers at a frenzied pace.  The massive computing needs of AI require them to build them as fast as they can, regardless of the cost.  It’s now becoming debatable whether we’re living through a period of boom or bubble in data center construction:  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/02/global-datacentre-boom-investment-debt

Google plans to spend something like 90 billion dollars investments, mostly on data centers (not humans) this year.  This week alone it announced something like 5 billion to be spent on data centers in Germany.   This made the German politicians very happy, crowing about Germany’s high-tech investment environment.  https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/google-investition-deutschland-klingbeil-100.html

But should local people really be happy to see a data center built in their backyard?  Should politicians really welcome them?  Benefits are few:  data centers create very few long-term jobs, mostly junior technicians.  The servers, chips and high value tech work are done remotely, often on the other side of the planet.  Harms locally can be more significant:  data centers consume vast amounts of power and water (to run and cool them).  This can put stress on either the electricity grid or the water supplies or both, and sometimes leads to rising electricity costs for all.  https://fortune.com/2025/11/08/voter-fury-ai-bubble-high-electricity-prices-offseason-elections-openai/

The environmental impact of data centers is now the subject of study.  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-centers-latin-america

Back in 2007, I was asked by my then-employer Google to officiate publicly the opening of its big new data center in Belgium.  The investment was valued at around 250 million.  (Compare that to Facebook’s recent announcement of planning to spend 600 billion on data centers …https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meta-plans-600-billion-us-175901659.html ).  But back then, 250 million was a big deal.  Even the Belgian Minister President (later Prime Minister) Elio Di Rupo came along to celebrate it, and he and I took a long pleasant stroll through the town of Mons after the ceremony.  Like the German politicians this week, welcoming Google’s data center announcement.  

But shouldn’t we all know better now?  Data centers are the physical concrete of the industrial infrastructure of the digital world.  The industrial revolution needed coal mines and steel mills, until it didn’t. The Google data center I opened in Belgium was in a depressed region full of abandoned coal mines and steel mills.  I fear history repeats itself. 

I understand that local politicians will welcome “investment” in their countries, even if 99% of the value of that investment comes from servers and chips and software created far away.  But we all need to look at the local environmental cost of these data centers.  If not, you’re just breathing the pollution of someone else’s beautiful shiny Ferrari.