What Happens When A Data Center Comes To Town?

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Otis Fiatan. In towns across America, the AI boom is no longer some abstract story out of Silicon Valley. It looks more like acres of land, new transmission lines, and warehouse size buildings, and a question many communities are suddenly asking. What happens when a data center comes to town?

Supporters say these projects bring jobs, tax revenue, and a chance for America to stay ahead in the race for artificial intelligence. But critics worry about the power bills, water use, noise, and whether small towns are being asked to trust big tech with two few answers. To help separate the reality from the fear today we're joined by Mark Mills, founder and

executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, and author of the Cloud Revolution.

“I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley, and this is a weekend”

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Let's grow together. Who's wired to save today? Offer is valid for a limited time, turns and conditions may apply. Joining us now to discuss the explosive growth of data centers is Mark Mills, founder and executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics.

Mark, thanks for coming on. My pleasure. So we're hearing a lot about these data centers that are moving into some rural areas. I've also heard that they're going to some urban areas as well.

“Do you have a sense of how many of these are currently being built?”

And then I want to ask you about the effect that they have on the immediate area.

Well, first we should do the context.

The framing is as if the country has just started building data centers. The country already had before the AI revolution that everybody paying attention to data centers. About 5,000 data centers had already been built in the United States. The first one was built in Santa Clara, 1998 back when it was big news to say, "You

got mail." And since then, we've had this explosion of services that so many people take for granted. You're mapping your banking, social media, doing what we're doing right now, storing family videos, dreaming, movies, all that takes place in data centers. So data centers have been around for a very long time.

The big difference between data centers of the last 20 years, and today, is that we're building more of them, which is important because of AI, and they're bigger because of AI as much more compute and tense that is, takes a lot more computer chips and it takes a lot more energy. So the combination of those two things is sort of like a slow roll from building for two

So all of a sudden, seems like an overnight revolution, "Hey, we're building data centers." It's not a new thing, but it's a big thing.

So now, we're going to basically double the number of data centers we have.

“Is that kind of the scale of the increase we're looking at?”

Well, that's why that's why the news. So the total amount of data centers now under construction, and that will be completed in the next few years, is greater than all the square feet of data centers in the last 20 years. Now, the square feet are, you were building, because we're not going to build, we're not

going to build thousands more, we're building hundreds, but each of them are larger. So it's square footage, it's like we're now building skyscrapers instead of shopping walls. Now, you mentioned that they're very energy intensive. What kind of resource draw does it pull from this surrounding community?

Is this something that's going to spike people's electricity costs?

Is it something that's going to spike their water costs?

What are the immediate effects on the people that live around these data centers? Well, the media costs are what all industrial. It's a form of industrial construction, except once it's built and running, the industrial activity is building it, it's like building a warehouse, strictly speaking, it's not like building a factory that emits fumes and smoke, and it's not like a factory, a chemical

factory that consumes water for chemical processing, and then has to clean water to put it back into the river of the water system. So water is used for cooling, when you use water for cooling, you don't have to use water, you can close the cycle, use it over and over again, it's cheaper to use it once, there's adequate water from all the data centers, I'm aware of, get permits that there's adequate

water to use for that purpose. So it uses land that uses power from the local grid, or sometimes it can power them a thousand clicks of length, because they haven't been most of the new ones haven't been built yet, their power use is not yet impacting electric rates, so they claim that electric rates aren't because of data centers, as they cause an effect problem, they be like claiming

your cargers and gasoline, while it's being built in a factory, it's not what it works. Now even if they are providing their own electricity, if they're sharing the grid with the community, is their electricity used on that shared grid going to potentially cause strain? Well, this is a good example of it depends on where you are in the country.

So some grids cannot handle a magnitude of demand, in which case the data center operators are not connected to the grid at all, so it has no effect on local grid, because you provide your own power entirely off the grid. In some parts of the country, where they do connect to the grid, there's a lot of negotiation or a kabuki dance if you like between the data center operators and the grid operators

to make sure they don't negatively impact consumer rates. In fact, that's probably the hottest topic right now in the data center world is to avoid impact in consumer rates, to make sure that the president has said that you pay for it. And you know, who could not endorse that philosophy that the consumer of the power should

“pay for the costs on the grid to pay for that power?”

And all the data center operators have pledged to do that.

So I think there's a lot of hype and concern that runs ahead of what the reality is.

Now are these data centers a boom for communities in terms of things like increasing the tax space? Are they good employers for the community? How does this actually affect the surrounding area financially? Well, the data are pretty clear.

They're a huge financial boom for communities, but there's two kinds of jobs. The one, of course, is a construction job, which are most of the jobs will repeat a year or two or three years. So some of those jobs are imported labor because it's not enough locally during the operations of a data center.

They're kind of like, if you like, big utility power plants themselves, use a lot more labor to build the power plant and doesn't matter whether it's a solar power plant, winter or gas turbines. They use far less labor to maintain and operate them, but it does create jobs. The biggest impact, which we have a lot of data on, as I said, because there's thousands

of data centers, is on the tax space, reduction of costs to the local community.

“I think the biggest negative impact that people push back on is aesthetic.”

You know, if you don't want a big ugly warehouse, you probably don't want a big square building looks like a joint warehouse that has, doesn't matter whether it's computer chips in it or boxes or shipping to the face, it may not be pretty, so the sliding issue becomes very important in local communities. Now, how big are these going to be exactly?

You said they're going to be much bigger than we currently have. I've seen some very large Amazon warehouses, are these going to be bigger than anything we currently have or is that about the size that they'll be? Well, if you've driven by big Amazon warehouse or anybody's warehouse on a highway, those are the typical scale of individual buildings, it's they amount of power used per building,

which is getting, getting the attention, and it's getting the attention for good reason. It's a, it's a unusual level, so power demand in fact, in some respects, cost log precedent. We haven't built very many things that use that much power per building ever. They roughly speaking, think of it as 10 times more power than a skyscraper, but it's the same size as a skyscraper in square feet.

of the externalities of these data centers, but on the flip side have also heard some

rumors that the CCP is circulating some propaganda, some anti-data center propaganda, because they want people here to fight against putting up these data centers for their own reasons. Do you have any insider information about whether there is a propaganda war being fought over this? And if there's any truth to those rumors?

“Well, first, I think there is a propaganda war being fought for a variety of reasons.”

Some people don't like data centers for all kinds of reasons, so they don't like social

media, so you fight the data centers, data centers, or where the computers live, the great social media. If you worry about AI taking jobs, I'm on the camp that thinks AI creates jobs, but it doesn't impact jobs. But AI lives in data centers, so you want to pose a data center.

Your point is a serious point.

“It is my view, and of course, I wrote a book on this, called "The Cloud Revolution."”

AI and data centers cost two days substantial and a profound technological revolution that will help and expand our economies. So lots of problems, also, as has military significance, making our economy stronger as geopolitical significance, which, I doubt, the Chinese would be picking up from up, certainly not many people in Russia, Iran.

So it would be naive to think that our enemies aren't funding, fueling, and promoting a disinformation in propaganda. The slow down America's economic machine, and frankly, derivatively, it's military capabilities, which come from a strong economy, and directly from the technologies associated with AI. So I'll show it to you.

Yes, of course. I would believe that there has to be propaganda.

“That's what our enemies have done for ever, and it would be really naive to think that”

they aren't doing that now.

Right, always wise to keep that in mind.

Mark, thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. That was Mark Mills, founder, and executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics. And this has been a weekend edition of OneWineWineWineWine.