Data centers are coming to towns but what’s the cost?

The Richmond County project is one of the largest data center projects in the region, but it’s far from the only one. Proposals for data centers in Matthews, Statesville, Mooresville, even Uptown Charlotte have been met with less enthusiastic responses.

In Matthews, Mayor John Higdon said most of the public concern focused on water and power use. He said the developers told him the site would need 600MW of electricity, enough to power 180,000 homes, or the Town of Matthews five times over.

“We did meet with Duke [Energy] and they said they could deliver the power so that wasn’t a concern, they could deliver but there were concerns that the citizens brought up about maybe our rates going up because of that increased demand,” he said.

There were other concerns about on-site diesel generators and the pollution they might emit, worries about noise and in the end, Higdon said the opposition was so overwhelming, developers pulled out.

“I would not recommend any developer come to Matthews and suggest building a data center here after this most recent experience,” he said.

What is a data center?

Data centers are like the backbone of the digital world. At their core, they are buildings full of servers that hold the data and programs that run the internet. Every email you send, every picture you upload, even this story, they all exist as a file on a server in some data center somewhere.

Sometimes they’re owned by the big tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. These are called hyperscale facilities, which are sometimes owned by outside developers who rent out their server space. These are called colocation facilities.

Currently, data center development is ramping up to power the rise of AI, but data centers themselves aren’t new, even to the Charlotte area.

In Lenior, Caldwell County Economic Development director Ashely Bolick said the community is proud to have one of the first large hyperscale data centers in the region. Google came to Caldwell County in 2008 and has since expanded its campus to multiple buildings with room to grow. Meanwhile neighboring counties started to get their own data center projects.

“The Google data center here in Lenior kind of started it and from that point you got Facebook you got Apple, you got Microsoft and other smaller data centers but most of them are here for the same reason, access to infrastructure like power and water,” she said.

How much water and energy do they use?

A lot.

Data centers need energy to power their servers 24/7 and water to keep them from overheating.

According to a report from Berkeley Lab, data centers across the country used just under 100 terawatt hours of energy in 2023 and directly consumed 66 billion liters of water.

To put those numbers in context, that’s about 4.5% of total U.S. energy consumption and as for water, it’s about how much 500,000 people would use in a year, though it’s not necessarily an outlier for major industries. U.S. Steel, for example, used 1.162 trillion liters of water that same year.

However, data centers do have a much bigger water use case connected to their energy generation. Nearly every type of energy generation requires water, often heating it with coal, gas or nuclear reactions to turn turbines to make electricity. Because data centers use a ton of electricity, they indirectly use a lot of water, an estimated 800B liters in 2023, according to Berkeley Lab.

That use is expected to skyrocket as data center development ramps up over the next few years. Berkeley Lab projects data centers could use up to 12% of all electricity generated in the United States.

To serve this increase in energy demand, many utilities, including Duke Energy, are planning large fossil fuel buildouts and delaying the closures of coal plants. In turn this will lead to more localized air pollution and delay efforts to fight climate change.

How much do the local centers use?

It’s difficult to say, because it’s not easy to find specific water use data.

Different data centers can use different cooling methods, recycle their cooling water in various ways or rely on air cooling instead. They might also generate their own electricity on-site reducing that indirect water usage. The Apple data center in Maiden, for example, owns multiple nearby solar farms to help power its facility.

Channel 9 requested information from the utilities serving the largest data centers in the region, but they declined to share specifics. According to North Carolina law, water usage is not subject to public records law.

When we contacted the tech companies themselves, Apple did not answer and Amazon sent a statement detailing their efforts to conserve water and keep energy rates stable: “Amazon is committed to being a responsible neighbor in our data center communities, investing in local economic development while prioritizing water and energy efficiency that exceeds industry standards.”

Google publishes an annual sustainability report which states in 2024, the Lenior data center consumed 327 million gallons of water, roughly enough to keep two golf courses green year round.

How does this impact their communities?

According to Bolick, the Lenior data center has been a positive influence on their community. It’s one of the county’s largest tax payers, it employs dozens of locals and since it started operations, there’s been no issues with keeping water flowing and the lights on in the county.

“I think that everyone’s entitled to their own opinions and concerns, but from a community and as an individual who works closely with the data centers now, I don’t think they have anything to be fearful of,” she said.

Brandon Jones, the Catawba Riverkeeper, is more skeptical. He said the Catawba basin doesn’t have the same water scarcity issues that other parts of the country face but we do face droughts. If we want to ensure our water remains abundant and available even when the rain slows down, he warns the region should be careful about how many large water users we add.

“We are still at the whims of mother nature and we really need consistent rain and the more industry that you put on that’s using more and more of these resources that we can’t turn off, that we can’t throttle it really gives us less sustainability,” he said.

Jones said it’s especially difficult to plan around when we don’t know how much water we could be consuming. To communities either working to attract data centers or currently vetting proposed data center projects, Jones said they should work to nail down that data and ensure if a data center is coming in, it will give back to the community enough to make up for the amount of resources it plans to use.

“It is important for these facilities to at least say, ”This is how much water we’re using, this is how much energy we’re going to be using," so we can compare it to other possible uses for those limited resources.”

VIDEO: Charlotte data center project moves forward without public input, raising questions