If the US must build data centers, here’s where they should go

Technology companies have With so much money invested in building data centers in recent months, it’s actively driving the US economy, and the AI ​​race shows no signs of slowing down. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told President Donald Trump last week that the company will spend $600 billion on US infrastructure — including data centers — by 2028, while OpenAI has already committed to spending $1.4 trillion.

An extensive new analysis looks at the environmental footprint of data centers in the United States to examine exactly what the country may face in the next few years—and where the U.S. should build data centers to avoid the most damaging environmental impacts.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Communications, uses a variety of data, including demand for artificial intelligence chips and information on government electricity and water shortages, to predict the potential environmental impact of future data centers by the end of the decade. The study models a number of different possible scenarios for how data centers could impact the United States and the planet, warning that tech companies’ net-zero promises likely won’t hold up to the energy and water demands of the massive facilities being built.

Fengqi You, a professor of energy systems engineering at Cornell and one of the authors of the analysis, said the study, which began three years ago, was “timed to understand how artificial intelligence affects climate systems and water use and consumption.”

He adds that the AI ​​industry is “growing much faster than we expected” — especially given the Trump administration’s laser focus on the industry. “It’s all picking up a lot right now.”

Not all data centers are created equal in terms of environment: a lot of their water and carbon footprints depend on where they are located. Some US states may have grids that use more renewable energy, or are making big strides in using more clean energy on the grid. This greatly reduces carbon emissions from data centers that draw power from those grids. Similarly, states with less water scarcity are better suited to supply large amounts of water needed for cooling data centers. (Cooling also accounts for a large portion of data center energy consumption.) The best locations for a data center in the next few years in the U.S. are states that balance those two inputs: Texas, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, the analysis found, “are optimal candidates for AI server installations.”

Most data center construction in the US has historically been concentrated in places like Virginia, the data center hub of the US, and Northern California. Proximity to Washington, D.C. and Silicon Valley was important to data center companies, as was dense fiber connectivity in those areas and their skilled workforce. Virginia has also offered significant tax breaks for data centers for years — a technique other states have turned to to attract development. According to Data Center Map, an industry tool that tracks data center development, of the more than 4,000 data centers in the U.S., more than 650 are in Virginia — the most in the nation — and California has more than 320, ranking third.