Data centers have become the chic new enemy among activists.
Critics claim the centers are using inordinate amounts of electricity and water to power artificial intelligence, inspiring protesters to take to the streets and Democratic lawmakers to head to Albany to stymie their development.
However, some experts say the anti-data center push is more of a moral panic than an empirical one, often based on speculative and sometimes bunk projections.
It seems that data centers are the boogeyman onto which larger fears about the impact of AI are being projected.
“The estimates of future data-center development may be overestimated by a factor of three to five,” Jonathan Koomey, an energy researcher who has been studying data-center electricity usage for decades, told The Post. “It is not as simple as saying, ‘We don’t want data centers to use water.’ You have to think about the trade-offs.”
Concerns about data centers have largely centered around the idea that they are massive guzzlers of energy and water, which (alongside aircon) is used to cool banks of servers and electical equipment.
Worries about water consumption have been popularized via an oft-repeated statistic about the water consumption of a Chilean data center from journalist Karen Hao’s book, “Empire of AI.” The only problem: Hao had accidentally exaggerated the water usage by a factor of 1,000.
According to the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, just 0.2% of New York state’s water and 3.5% of the state’s electricity were used by data centers in 2025.
David Mytton, a researcher of sustainable computing at Oxford University, says “people tend to focus on very large numbers” that “sound very large by themselves” but are totally devoid of context.
For example, the last reliable data for data center water usage is a study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which estimated the 2023 data center consumption of water in USA to be 17.4 billion gallons.
It may sound like a lot, but is dwarfed by other water uses. Swimming Pools use 200 billion gallons and Golf Courses 476 billion gallons, on average, per year. A million gallons of water flow into New York City each day for its nine million residents.
“Data centers account for less than 1% of US water consumption. The largest user is agriculture, which accounts for around 80% of water consumption in the US,” Mytton said.
“When you’re talking about millions of gallons of water per day going into some data centers, the equivalent in agriculture is tens of billions of gallons per day.”
And while more data centers are being built, they’re also becoming more efficient. Amazon said it used 2.5 billion gallons of water in its data centers in 2025, and is 75% of the way there to being “water positive” by 2030.
Koomey’s analysis of data center electricity consumption also found that projections about future energy usage are based on very uncertain predictions of future industry growth and also often double count certain facilities, leading to overestimation in the public imagination.
“If I had to choose one thing that is leading people to think this is a bigger deal than it is, the double-counting issue is a big one,” he said.
Powering data centers in the US in 2026 will use 270 terawatt-hours (TWh) according to the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. That’s slightly less than is used for residential and commerical lighting over the year, and about 60% of the 437 Twh of electricity used to power air conditioners across the country. The US is estimated to have consumed 4,200 TWh of electricity in total in 2025.
Still, the idea Data Centers are uniquely environmentally evil has staying power among protesters, who rally behind mottos like “data centers are energy vampires” and “hot sl—ts hate data centers.”
It’s a panic that New York Dems have latched onto. This month they passed a one year pause on the approval of building large data centers, the first moratorium of its kind in the nation.
“All these politicians want to be populists and they all want a scapegoat to blame; data centers are just the latest example,” Ross Marchand, executive director of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, told The Post. “Whenever politicians see that people are afraid, they see an opportunity to sow division, turn people against each other and mobilize the public.”
Data centers certainly aren’t entirely harmless and shouldn’t be built with reckless disregard. As Mytton points out, they can change the texture of rural communities and be especially detrimental in areas that already struggle with water access.
“None of these are insurmountable problems,” he said. “They require engagement and explanation with the local community. This all comes down to community engagement and understanding the concerns of the local population.”
But the anti-data center activism has expanded from those directly impacted in their communities into an online anti-capitalist movement that uses the centers as a straw man for attacking tech innovation.
It’s a trend that Koomey suspects foreign adversaries are encouragingin an effort to stymy American progress in AI.
“I’m 100% sure that there are people ginning it up and fomenting discontent,” he said. “Some of it is bottom-up, from people who are actually concerned about their communities… [but] there are state actors whose goal is simply to cause there to be dissension inside the United States.”
Unfortunately, many people are vulnerable to falling for these sorts of anti-progress narratives — simply because they are scared.
The anti-data center craze is less a result of real numbers and more a symptom of something far more significant: our anxiety about what AI will do to our economy and our lives. Claims about water and electricity are a tangible stand-in for our general uncertainty about where we’re heading.
Young people have plenty of reasons to be concerned about AI. But they should focus on the real ones, instead of peddling misinformation.
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