AI
Is Almost Here
See the December 8 Update
Partially from
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/04/nevada-ai-data-centers
https://gijn.org/stories/researching-water-consumption-data-centers
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/us-data-centers
By my count that’s 16 coolers per pod, 12 pods per row, 12 rows!
That’s 16 x 12 x 12 coolers = 2,304
Each one is probably able to cool 4 homes. That’s 9,216 homes!
Artificial Intelligence data centers require a massive amount of electricity and water.
- • A relatively small AI data center can consume more electricity than 80,000 homes.
- • A large AI data center, like the $165,000,000,000 (165 billion dollars) data center that OpenAI and Oracle are building in Abilene, Texas, will use as much electricity as 750,000 homes.
- • Meta is building a data center in Louisiana the size of Manhattan that will use as much electricity as 1,200,000,000 homes (one billion, 200 million homes).
A medium-sized data center can consume up to roughly 110,000,000 gallons (110 million) of water per year for cooling purposes, equivalent to the annual water usage of approximately 1,000 households.
Larger data centers can each “drink” up to 5,000,000,000 gallons per day, (five billion) or about 1,800,000,000,000 gallons of water annually, (one trillion eight hundred billion) usage equivalent to a town of 30,000 to 50,000 people.
Together, the nation’s 5,426 data centers consume billions of gallons of water annually.
One report estimated that U.S. data centers consume 449,000,000 (four hundred forty-nine million) gallons of water per day and 163,700,000,000 (one hundred sixty-three billion seven hundred million) gallons annually (as of 2021).
A 2016 report
found that fewer than one-third
of data center operators
track water consumption.
Water consumption is expected to continue increasing as data centers grow in number, size, and complexity.
The uses of the Colorado River water
already EXCEED it’s actual flow!Where is all this water going to come from?
Is the plan keep water away from citizens
to keep the AI servers cool?
And how does the “community” get all this electrical power into the data center? With HUGE, UGLY POWER POLES that run across land that was once natural and healthy.
The farmer on the left REFUSED
to have ugly power poles placed on his land.
So the ugly power poles had to “jump” Marana Road.
See the good ol’ “baby” power poles on the left?
We liked baby power poles and the farmland.
Ugly SIX WIRE MONSTER POWER POLES
we do NOT like! They are HORRIBLE!
Not only do we have to LOOK AT THE UGLINESS
OF THE POWER POLES THEMSELVES,
we will also be poisoned by the harmful, disease-causing RFI
that the huge power lines radiate into the unlucky inhabitants!
The dark, ugly, huge power poles were bad enough. Then came the even-bigger, eight-wire
silver MONSTER poles!
WAY BIGGER! WAY UGLIER!
It looks like Marana is getting ready
to deliver A LOT of electricity somewhere.
Anyone willing to guess
WHERE they’re going to deliver it—
and FOR WHAT PURPOSE?
December 8 Update
From
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/08/us-data-centers
Exclusive: Congress urged to act
against energy-hungry facilities
blamed for increasing bills
and worsening climate crisis
A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US, the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate crisis.
The green groups, including
- • The town of Marana, Arizona
- • Greenpeace
- • Friends of the Earth
- • Food & Water Watch
- • and dozens of local organizations
have urged members of Congress to halt the proliferation of energy-hungry datacenters, accusing them of causing planet-heating emissions, sucking up vast amounts of water and for electricity bill increases that have hit Americans this year.
“The rapid, largely unregulated rise of datacenters . . .
- • to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is
- • disrupting communities across the country
- • and threatening Americans’ economic,
- • environmental,
- • climate and
- • water security,”
. . . the letter states, adding that approval of new data centers should be paused until new regulations are put in place.
December 16 Update
From
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/16/data-centers-consumer-prices
Three Democratic US senators announced Tuesday that they are investigating whether big tech companies are passing the soaring utility costs of “energy-guzzling” data centers on to ordinary Americans. The trio sent letters to the heads of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta as well as the data center operators CoreWeave, Digital Realty and Equinix asking for greater transparency, cost-sharing and accountability.
Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote that they were alarmed by reports that these data centers caused residential electricity bills to “skyrocket.” Regions with significant data center activity have already endured price increases by as much as 267% over the past five years, the three lawmakers wrote. According to the Energy Information Administration, a federal agency, the average cost of a US family’s electricity bill had risen 7% year-over-year as of September.
“Through these utility price increases, American families bankroll the electricity costs of trillion-dollar tech companies,” they stated, demanding that data centers and tech companies “pay their fair share of their electricity rates” and “a greater share of the costs upfront for future energy usage.”
Lawmakers asked companies for more information about their current and projected number of data centers, and their energy usage, as well as what actions have been taken to prevent electricity costs from being passed on to consumer energy bills. They also inquired about the tax deductions or other financial incentives these companies received from state and local governments, as well as payments they made to lobbyists and consultants to advocate for the construction of data centers. They requested a response no later than 12 January 2026.
The rapid expansion of AI – and the fact that a single data center can “use enough electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes,” according to the senators – means that utility companies have spent billions of dollars building new transmission lines and power plants. Data centers could account for 12% of the country’s power consumption by 2028, according to the US Department of Energy. About one-third of the country’s more than 4,000 data centers are located in three states: Virginia, Texas and California.
At least one study questions the link between data centers and increasing electricity prices. A recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that data centers may have actually helped reduce average retail electricity prices. Experts say that utility companies can spread fixed infrastructure costs among more power customers.
In the letters, lawmakers highlighted specific examples of tech companies publicly insisting they do not want taxpayers to be overburdened by data centers, while simultaneously opposing state and local efforts to regulate them.
“Tech companies have paid lip service in support of covering their data centers’ energy costs, but their actions have shown the opposite,” the letters noted.
Google, Amazon, CoreWeave and Equinix did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Digital Realty said in an emailed statement that it “looks forward to working with all elected officials to continue to invest in the digital infrastructure required to support America’s leadership in technology.” Meta and Microsoft declined to comment.
While the senators’ letters focus mostly on the financial burden of data centers, the massive structures’ enormous energy usage also comes with a significant climate cost. A Cornell study published last month in Nature Sustainability found that data centers could annually consume as much water as 6 million-10 million Americans and emit as much carbon dioxide as 5 million to 10 million cars!
###