ChatGPT first became publicly available in November 2022.
Claude.ai launched in July 2023.
According to the United States International Trade Commission as of January 2021 there were about 8,000 data centers worldwide. The United States has around a third of the data centers. The U. S. government has nearly 1,000.
Data are being created very rapidly, much of that is online, and data centers are needed to store it. According to the MMCG, a real estate investment/data research firm, the number of data centers under construction in the U. S. as of June 2026 was roughly 162.
By and large data centers aren’t used specifically for LLM AI; they’re used for data more generally. Modern data centers are used for cloud computing, storage, websites, streaming, enterprise applications, databases, content delivery, AI training and inference, and much else. Worldwide data creation and replication went from 2 zettabytes in 2010 to 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 (a zettabyte is a billion gigabytes).
I can understand NIMBY impulses; there have been concerns about data center construction locally for decades. I cannot understand outright opposition to the construction of data centers and the tone and just plain hysteria of the complaints. Why not five years ago? Why not ten?
None of this is to say that there are no legitimate objections to particular data centers. They consume electricity, require infrastructure, may consume substantial amounts of water, and can impose real costs on the communities in which they are located. Those are reasonable subjects for zoning, regulation, and negotiation.
But they aren’t new.
Neither is the growth in demand for data centers. Long before ChatGPT appeared, Americans were streaming video, moving corporate computing into the cloud, storing photographs and video online, shopping online, operating enormous databases, and generating ever-increasing quantities of data. Data-center capacity was expanding to accommodate those uses.
What is new is the intensity of the opposition.
That raises an obvious question. If the objection is actually to data centers, why didn’t we see comparable opposition five or ten years ago?
One possible answer is simply scale. Today’s projects can be much larger and much more demanding of the electrical grid than their predecessors. That undoubtedly explains some of the increased concern.
But I don’t think it explains all of it. Something else changed at almost exactly the same time: data centers acquired a new public identity. They became “AI data centers.”
And that suggests that at least some of what is being expressed as opposition to data centers isn’t really opposition to data centers at all. It is opposition to AI, Big Tech, and the economic and social changes with which they have become associated.
There is, of course, a simple way to reduce the need for additional data centers: reduce our use of the services that require them.
Stop streaming video. Stop storing photographs and documents in the cloud. Stop using social media. Stop shopping online. Stop using cloud-based business applications. Stop using smart doorbells, smart thermostats, connected automobiles, smartphones, tablets, and PCs connected to the Internet. And, yes, stop using LLM AI.
I don’t expect that to happen.
What we call “the cloud” has a physical existence. It consists of data centers, fiber-optic cables, electrical generating capacity, transmission lines, substations, cooling systems, and all of the other infrastructure required to deliver the online services we increasingly demand.
We cannot simultaneously demand ever more online services and reasonably expect the physical infrastructure supporting those services to stop growing.
That does not mean that every proposed data center should be built wherever its developer wants to put it. Questions about location, water, electricity, noise, taxation, and who pays for necessary infrastructure are perfectly legitimate.
But those are arguments about how and where data centers should be built. They are not arguments that we don’t need them.
