An Ungrateful Public Underappreciates Data Centers

When data center opponents seek to hype the environmental strains caused by these facilities, they often describe their water and electricity usage in terms of household or community equivalents. This data center will consume as much electricity as a small town. That data center's water usage is the same as 50,000 homes. The implied takeaway is that this is a lot. But it's not really. In today's modern economy, the individual household is a mostly production-free zone. Where we once grew our own food and made our own clothes, today we buy those things from large enterprises that produce them offsite. While the amount of resources individual households in rich countries consume is gargantuan, the resources needed to run individual homes that are mostly used for sleeping, eating, and child-r