I’m thrilled to share that Business Insider has won the George Polk Award for Environmental Reporting for The True Cost of Data Centers, an investigation that created the most comprehensive national database of data centers and revealed hidden costs of the AI boom.
The George Polk Awards, which honor original, resourceful, and thought-provoking investigative work, are widely considered among the most prestigious in journalism. The judges said Business Insider’s investigation was “a thoroughly researched series highlighting the strain new and semi-secret facilities that fuel artificial intelligence are likely to place on communities, diverting overwhelming amounts of power, water and economic support.”
This is Business Insider’s first Polk Award. It is a milestone for our newsroom as we focus our investigative chops on the most crucial subjects in business, and as we combine our extraordinary talents across text, data, visuals, video, and more to deliver world-class journalism.
The True Cost of Data Centers identified 1,240 data centers built or approved across the US by the end of 2024 — nearly four times the number from 2010 — and exposed an infrastructure transformation happening almost entirely in secret. By filing public records requests across every US state and winning lawsuits to obtain water consumption data, our team uncovered how these data centers together would consume as much power as entire US states and guzzle enormous amounts of water daily in drought-stricken regions.
Business Insider’s investigation included a first-of-its-kind interactive national map displaying all 1,240 data centers for readers to see how close the data center boom is to their own backyards. It also included a documentary video, “Exposing The Dark Side of America’s AI Data Center Explosion,” which has been watched more than 5 million times.
The database has been shared with 23 universities, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and Columbia, and has been cited in at least 15 policy briefs.
I am incredibly proud of this team for the creativity, care, and persistence it took to make this investigation happen. The reporting team includes Hannah Beckler, Dakin Campbell, Daniel Geiger, Rosemarie Ho, Narimes Parakul, Adam Rogers, and Ellen Thomas, along with editors Jeffrey Cane, Rosalie Chan, Jason Dean, Esther Kaplan, and Jake Swearingen.
On video, credit to Erica Berenstein, Alexander Calbi, Paige Clark, Robert Leslie, Reem Makhoul, Tyler Merkel, Ruqayyah Moynihan, Marco Secci, and Whitney Shefte. On design and visuals: Dan DeLerenzo, Isabel Fernandez-Pujol, Jinpeng Li, Kim Nguyen, Randy Yeip, and Rebecca Zisser, as well as photographers Kendrick Brinson, John David-Richardson, Greg Kahn, Brian Palmer, and Jesse Rieser.
Thanks also to Glen Smith on legal, Mo Mitchell on prizes, researchers Darren Ankrom, Schuyler Mitchell, Trey Strange, and Yuheng Zhan, and copy editors Mark Abadi and Kevin Kaplan.
Finally, thank you to everyone throughout our newsroom and company who plays their part in making work like this possible and exceptional.
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