WASHINGTON, September 24 — The warehouse-sized buildings that power cloud services, artificial intelligence and streaming have become the newest flashpoint in rural America, where residents are organizing against rapid construction over three resources: electricity, water and land. The friction is not abstract. Data centers are among the most energy-intensive buildings ever constructed, and the numbers behind the boom are stark.
The International Energy Agency reported in 2024 that global data center electricity consumption was about 460 terawatt-hours in 2022, roughly 2 percent of global electricity demand, and projected it could reach more than 1,000 TWh by 2026. In the United States, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated in a 2024 report that data centers consumed about 176 TWh in 2023, or 4.4 percent of total US electricity, and projected that share could rise to between 6.7 percent and 12 percent by 2028.
The US Department of Energy has noted that data centers can consume 10 to 50 times the electricity per square foot of a typical commercial office building.
Water Becomes the Second Front
Many facilities use evaporative cooling, which consumes millions of gallons of water per day. A 2021 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters estimated that US data centers directly consumed about 1.7 billion liters (roughly 450 million gallons) of water per day, and that indirect water consumption from electricity generation was far larger. In water-stressed regions, including parts of Arizona, Georgia, Texas and Virginia, local officials and residents have questioned whether data center withdrawals are sustainable.
Land use and tax incentives form the third front. States and counties frequently offer property tax abatements and sales tax exemptions to attract data centers.
A 2023 report by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that tracks economic development subsidies, documented more than $2 billion in state and local subsidies awarded to data center projects over the previous decade, with Virginia, Texas and Georgia among the largest providers. Critics argue that the promised jobs are few relative to the subsidies, because data centers employ relatively small permanent staffs, often a few dozen to a few hundred workers per campus.
Organized Opposition Takes Shape
Organized opposition has emerged in several states. In Prince William County, Virginia, the heart of the world’s largest data center market, residents and local officials have debated limits on new construction and transmission lines. In Georgia, the Public Service Commission has held hearings on how to allocate the costs of new generation capacity driven by data center demand; Georgia Power has projected large load growth from data centers.
In Arizona, concerns about water use have prompted scrutiny of facilities in the Phoenix metropolitan area. In Oregon, the city of The Dalles drew attention in 2021 when a confidential water use agreement with Google became public, showing the company used about 274 million gallons of water in 2021, a 35 percent increase from 2020.
The industry counters that data centers are essential infrastructure for the digital economy, that they pay substantial property taxes in many jurisdictions, and that companies are investing in renewable energy and water-efficient cooling. Major operators including Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta have announced nuclear, solar and wind power agreements and water replenishment goals. The tension is likely to intensify as artificial intelligence workloads expand.
The IEA has projected that electricity demand from data centers, cryptocurrencies and AI could double by 2026. For rural communities, the debate is not abstract: it is about who pays for new transmission lines, how much water is drawn from local aquifers, and whether the tax revenue outweighs the loss of farmland and quiet.
Watch for local moratoriums, state legislation and utility rate cases pending in multiple states.
