BY ROBERT HORNAK | news@queensledger.com
There’s an old saying that Social Security is the third rail of politics. Meaning that trying to touch that as an issue, to advocate for any desperately needed reforms to make sure the system is sound for years to come, would be like touching the third rail of a train network, the rail with the electricity, causing instant death.
Now the issue of data centers appears to have reached that level of controversy and we are at that point where we refuse to acknowledge the simple reality that data centers are an absolute necessity and something that we can’t avoid having to deal with in a proactive way. Trying to stop progress has never been a successful strategy.
However, claiming to slow or stop their development is becoming a popular position, especially among Democrat governors like Kathy Hochul, whose tech-addicted base is nevertheless opposed to the businesses that make all their favorite tech devices possible.
As so often happens in situations like this, these businesses just go about their business and provide the services or tools that the public need or want. But their opposition is out there organizing, pushing narratives that may stretch the truth, or may ignore it completely.
The attack on data centers has taken shape and mostly focuses on issues concerning electricity and water usage, claiming that they use so much that the availability and cost for both skyrockets.
According to the website Data Center Map there are currently 4,286 data centers nationwide, with 224 tracked centers in NY, most in and around NYC. The single largest data center in NY is at 375 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan (the former Verizon building), with over 1,000,000 square feet of space. There is also 60 Hudson Street with around 420,000 square feet serving as a premier carrier hotel – a specialized telecomm facility where network service providers, internet service providers (ISPs), and carriers interconnect and exchange data traffic.
We are already surrounded by data centers and never realized it. For most people it seems more like a theoretical problem that people somewhere else will need to deal with. So is it really a problem if we are already inundated with data centers and didn’t know?
Sure, like every business, these have needs in terms of resources. But they also provide services that we rely on every day. The University of Georgia College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences recently released a report on data centers and analyzed what the specific uses cost in terms of water usage for the most common open-loop evaporative cooling systems, including:
Browsing or scrolling social media for 1 hour could use 15 oz of fresh water.
A 1-hour video call, Zoom or similar, uses approximately 60 oz of water.
Streaming 1 hour of high definition 1080p video requires approximately 0.1 to 3 gallons (12 to 384 oz) of water.
One AI query is estimated to use 16 oz of fresh water (Collier, 2024). ChatGPT alone estimates more than 10 million queries per day.
The report also acknowledges that “all U.S. data centers combined were estimated to consume about 449 million gallons of water per day in 2021, which is a relatively small amount (0.14%) when compared to the total U.S. water consumption of 322 billion gallons per day.”
Of course, impact is usually measured locally, and the potential impact to a specific community are reasonable concerns. There are, however, many options for both water and power. There are many other ways to cool data centers, using closed loop water systems that dramatically minimize local impact, air cooling (which is more energy dependent), or systems that use direct contact with new coolant fluids.
Electricity generation will have to increase, and rapidly, as many people have been warning, to meet the demand of our increasingly electricity-based world. Small footprint nuclear power plants, whether built by utility companies or the data centers, are the only way to meet this demand.
So the question becomes very simple, if you don’t want to make accommodations for new data centers, how many hours of scrolling on TikTok or Instagram and how many streaming programs are you willing to give up every day so that data centers are not required in your state?
