You've Used a Data Center Today. Here's What You Actually Need to Know About Them.
Data centers are showing up on the agenda at county planning meetings all over the country right now — including in plenty of towns that never had a tech debate in their life before this year. The pushback is loud, and honestly, a lot of it is coming from good instincts: nobody wants their water bill to spike or their community's water table drained so a server farm can stay cool.
But a lot of the conversation is also running on misinformation. So let's do what we do best on Around the House — cut through the noise and get to the actual facts, so you can walk into that planning meeting asking the right questions instead of just shouting “no.”
You're Already Using One — Probably Before Breakfast
Before you even get in the car this morning, you've likely touched a data center a dozen times. Check the weather? Data center. Unlock your phone with Face ID? Data center. Check your bank balance, send a Venmo payment, get your paycheck direct deposited? All of it runs through data centers — the New York Stock Exchange itself trades out of data centers in New Jersey now, with backups in Chicago. There's no physical trading floor moving that money anymore.
Streaming a show, storing your photos in the cloud, checking your smart doorbell camera, video-calling your doctor, refilling a prescription online, even calling 911 — every one of these everyday moments depends on this same infrastructure. Data centers aren't some exotic new invention that showed up alongside AI. They've been quietly running your life for decades. What's changed is the scale — AI, cloud storage, and streaming demand are all stacking on top of each other at the same time, and that's what's driving the current building boom.
The China Question: Who Should Be Building These?
Here's where things get more serious, and where I want to be straight with you: this is a live, debated issue in Washington, not a settled fact.
Congressional investigators have found real problems — Chinese state-linked telecom carriers kept equipment and network access inside U.S. data centers even after the FCC revoked their operating licenses. A House Select Committee report released in August 2026 found that one carrier alone, China Mobile USA, still had points of presence in 27 different U.S. data-center and interconnection facilities. The FBI has also said Chinese state-backed hacking campaigns have already gained access to pieces of U.S. telecom, energy, and water infrastructure — the same categories of critical infrastructure a data center plugs directly into.
Think of it like a bank vault. You'd want to know who has a key, not just who poured the concrete. A data center isn't just a warehouse full of computers — it's a chokepoint for financial transactions, medical records, utility controls, and communications. Who owns and physically maintains that building matters.
That said, it's fair to note the other side of this: some policy researchers argue “it's a China security risk” gets used as a catch-all justification any time there's local pushback, which can end up drowning out the legitimate water and power concerns that deserve their own hearing. There's also documented evidence — flagged by both OpenAI and the Senate Intelligence Committee — of Chinese-linked accounts posing as ordinary Americans online specifically to amplify anti-data-center sentiment. So the honest picture has two layers: real access risks that have been documented, and a topic that's also being used as a political football by more than one side.
The Water Question: The One Legitimate Worry
This is the part of the pushback that's genuinely well-founded, so let's give it the respect it deserves.
A typical enterprise data center uses 300,000 to 500,000 gallons of water a day for cooling. A large hyperscale AI campus can use up to 5 million gallons a day — that's comparable to the daily water use of an entire town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Nationally, U.S. data centers pulled roughly 17-18 billion gallons of water directly for cooling in 2023, and that number is projected to more than double by 2028.
Here's the part most people miss: the power plants generating the electricity for these data centers consume even more water than the buildings themselves — roughly 12 times more, by one federal lab estimate. Count that in, and the total U.S. water footprint tied to data centers was around 228 billion gallons in 2023.
Nationally, that's still a small slice of total U.S. water use — well under 1%. The real problem is concentration: an estimated 40% of U.S. data centers sit in areas already under high or extreme water stress, which is exactly why more than 50 cities and counties have pushed back or paused projects. The water concern isn't the boogeyman here. It's basic math, and it deserves a real answer at your next public hearing — not a shrug.
The Fix Already Exists — It's the Same Trick Nuclear Plants Use
Here's the good news, and it's the question I want every homeowner to start asking: closed-loop cooling already solves most of this, and it's not new technology. Nuclear power plants have used a version of it for decades.
Most data centers today cool themselves with evaporative cooling towers — the same principle as a nuclear plant's iconic cooling towers. Water evaporates to pull the heat out, and that water is genuinely consumed, not just borrowed. Closed-loop, or “dry,” cooling recirculates the same water indefinitely in sealed pipes, rejecting heat to the air instead of evaporating it away.
The numbers here are dramatic. Vantage's closed-loop campus in Wisconsin peaks at about 22,000 gallons of water a day — compared to roughly 5 million gallons a day for a comparable evaporative-cooled site. That's a 99%-plus reduction. Microsoft's zero-water cooling design saves an estimated 33 million gallons per facility every year. A new closed-loop AI facility going up outside Chicago is projected to save 277 million gallons a year compared to a conventional build.
So why doesn't every project just build this way? Cost. Closed-loop systems typically run 20 to 40% more expensive to build than a comparable evaporative system, and traditional dry cooling can use more electricity than evaporative cooling, especially in hot climates — the same reason a closed-cycle nuclear plant loses a few percentage points of generating efficiency compared to once-through cooling. Newer direct-to-chip closed-loop designs, the kind Oracle and Microsoft are building now, cool the chips directly instead of the whole room, which can actually cut power use rather than add to it — breaking that old trade-off.
Nuclear plants figured out closed-cycle cooling decades ago because rivers and lakes couldn't take the strain of pulling straight from the source. Data centers can do the exact same thing and cut water use by 99%. It costs more to build. So the question for your county commissioners isn't “block it or approve it” — it's “why isn't this one closed-loop, and who's paying the difference?”
No, Wildfires Aren't Being Set to Clear Land for Data Centers
Let's address this one directly, because it's spreading fast online and it deserves a straight answer: there's no credible evidence behind it.
A recurring claim on social media holds that wildfires are being deliberately set — sometimes blamed on arson, sometimes on fringe “directed energy weapon” theories — specifically to clear land for data center construction. This isn't new to data centers, either. The same pattern of claims followed the 2023 Maui fires, the 2025 Los Angeles fires, and wildfires in Canada and Spain, tied at various points to smart-city plans, high-speed rail, and wind farms. Data centers are just the newest target for an old conspiracy pattern.
A concrete recent example: after Georgia's Highway 82 wildfire this year, online posts claimed it was set to clear land for a data center. Georgia's governor publicly called the theory “unfortunate” and “not helpful,” and investigators pointed to documented, conventional ignition causes instead.
Multi-agency fire investigations — including the federal review of the Maui fires — have consistently traced major wildfires to conventional causes: downed power lines, drought, wind, human activity, and in some specific cases, arson arrests completely unrelated to any development project. The claims tend to follow the same pattern regardless of location — an irregular burn pattern, like a house destroyed next to trees left standing, gets presented online as “proof” of deliberate targeting, when investigators attribute it to ordinary factors like wind direction, moisture content, and building materials. A wood-frame house simply burns very differently than a living tree.
I get why it spreads. Losing your home to a fire is terrifying, and a conspiracy theory at least gives you someone to be angry at. But every time investigators have actually traced these fires, they land on power lines, drought, wind, or a person with a lighter — not a land grab for a server farm. Don't let a scary rumor replace the real conversation about water and power that these projects actually deserve.
The Next Chapter Might Not Be on the Ground at All
Here's something worth watching: the next generation of data centers might not be built in your county at all — they might be built in orbit. This isn't science fiction anymore. Google's Project Suncatcher is targeting a demonstration mission for 2027. The startup Starcloud already put an Nvidia H100 chip into orbit in November 2025. SpaceX and xAI have filed FCC applications for up to a million data-center satellites. Axiom Space is building toward an orbital data center as part of its planned space station.
The appeal is real. Solar panels in orbit soak up constant, unfiltered sunlight — no clouds, no nighttime, no atmosphere in the way — delivering roughly 1,361 watts per square meter versus 150 to 300 watts per square meter effective on the ground. Starcloud claims that could eventually mean power roughly 10 times cheaper than on Earth. And there's no zoning board, no water permit, and no neighborhood hearing to fight.
Here's the part that surprises most people, though: cooling is actually harder in space, not easier. On Earth, we cool data centers with air and water. In the vacuum of space, there's no air and no water to carry heat away — the only way to shed heat is by radiating it into space as infrared light, which is a far slower process than convection. Starcloud's own engineering white paper estimates that a radiator would need to be roughly the size of a hockey rink just to cool a data center a fraction of the size of a single Earth-based facility. Solving that cooling problem, not the sunlight or the zoning, is the single biggest engineering hurdle the entire orbital data center industry is racing to crack.
So don't be surprised if some of tomorrow's AI training runs happen a few hundred miles over your head instead of down the road — but the physics guarantees it won't be simple, and it won't be cheap to get there. Launch costs, not cooling or permitting, are what industry analysts say have to come down before any of this happens at real scale.
Bring It Back to What You Can Actually Do
County and city planning meetings are where data center siting, water sourcing, and power agreements actually get decided — not in a comment thread. That's where your voice as a homeowner has real leverage.
Skepticism is healthy. Misinformation isn't. Ask good questions about water and power. Ask specifically about cooling technology — evaporative versus closed-loop — and who's paying for the difference. Don't get distracted by fringe theories that investigators have already run down. That combination — informed skepticism instead of reflexive opposition — is how communities actually get a say in how these things get built, instead of getting steamrolled or getting nothing at all.
Want more of this kind of straight talk on home and infrastructure topics? Catch Around the House with Eric G on your local station or wherever you get your podcasts.