On the menu today: Readers, do you have any idea how much traffic I’m sacrificing by not writing “The Odyssey stinks” or “The Odyssey rocks” this morning, and subsequently watching the comments section burst into flames? Armond White, Giancarlo Sopo, Phil Klein, and Abigail Anthony have you covered. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I am amused by the bold predictions that the movie would flop and that there would be a boycott or backlash. (It made $264 million worldwide this weekend and had the biggest opening weekend of any non-animated movie so far this year.) As I noted yesterday, there’s a supernova-level Pauline Kael effect at work among a big chunk of the righty movie talk crowd (a crowd that, increasingly, rarely if ever seems to like any movies). The overwhelming majority of potential moviegoers have little or no opinion about casting Lupita Nyong’o or Elliot Page, or whether Christopher Nolan is being sufficiently faithful to the existing text. X is not real life; X users, even ones with a lot of followers, are wildly unrepresentative of society at large.
No, instead today we turn to data centers, which have bizarrely turned into the fiercest environmental issue in the country and a hot talking point in the 2026 midterms; the New York Times asks if the opposition to data centers represents “the fastest opinion shift in American politics.”
A recent chat with a friend illuminated the gargantuan physical challenges facing the data center boom. The political fights are getting all the attention, but the massive nationwide construction spree is rapidly running into other difficult laws — the laws of supply and demand. Read on.
The Non-Red Tape Reasons Data Centers Are Hard to Build
It’s not just when you use an artificial intelligence like ChatGPT or Claude; everything you do on the internet involves a data center in some form. When you purchase something on the internet, the seller’s website, payment processing, inventory, and order database all run on servers housed in data centers. Usually, a transaction involves multiple data centers — the retailer’s, the payment processors, and cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure.
Every telehealth meeting with your doctor involves video streams being routed through data center infrastructure, along with patient records, scheduling, and billing systems. Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, etc. all rely on data centers to handle call routing, recording, and account management, even if some of the audio/video processing happens on your device. Even the newsletter you’re reading right now, unless you’re viewing it saved locally, was served to your computer, phone, or tablet from a server in a data center.
Arguing against data centers is like arguing against the existence of the internet itself. We’re not putting that genie back into that bottle.
Right now, there are 4,500 active data centers nationwide, with another 700 under construction. As of December, U.S. spending on data center construction surpassed spending on office building construction. In April, the U.S. was spending $50 billion on data center construction, which is a bit more than how much Americans are collectively spending on public spending on all transportation-related structures — airport facilities, marine terminals, and mass transit.
But this year, the data center construction boom started hitting a wall. A JPMorgan analysis in May found that more than 60 percent of data center capacity planned for completion in 2027 isn’t yet under construction, and another 7 percent is delayed.
A lot of people will look at that development and blame organized opposition and red tape — local zoning restrictions and moratoriums, state laws like New York’s new ban on hyperscale data centers, lawsuits, environmental complaints, etc.
No doubt, those are factors, and I find it to be extremely plausible that the governments of China, Russia, and Iran are either fueling anti-data center sentiment, or that those countries’ foreign influence operations would use the issue to exacerbate political divisions in this country.
But lost in all the controversy and accusations are the facts that the simple physical requirements of building a data center are big and challenging — and are only getting harder and more complicated.
What It Takes to Build a Data Center
So, you’ve decided to build a data center!
The first choice you have to make is whether you’re going to build one from scratch or attempt to convert an existing building. It’s not impossible to convert existing buildings to data centers, but it is much more complicated, because most existing buildings aren’t built for what a data center needs to operate.
For starters, as you’ve likely heard, a data center requires a massive amount of electricity:
A typical enterprise data center uses 10–50 megawatts, while hyperscale facilities can exceed 100–500 MW. For perspective, 1 MW can power about 750–1,000 homes. The largest planned facilities — like the Stargate project in Abilene, Texas — will use over 1 GW, enough to power a small city.
To answer how much power does a data center use per day in one number: a typical 100 MW hyperscale facility consumes roughly 2.4 gigawatt-hours every 24 hours, enough to power around 85,000 American homes for the same day.
Some argue that comparing a data center’s electricity use to a home’s use is a misleading comparison, so another way of putting it is, “The typical number of watts per square foot for [data center] buildings can be more than 30 times higher than office buildings.”
A bunch of tech companies have concluded that the easiest way to handle the data centers’ demand for electricity is to generate the power themselves: “Companies including xAI, OpenAI and Meta have built or proposed building data centers powered by on-site gas generation. xAI’s Colossus data centers near Memphis draw power in part from gas turbines that have raised concerns about air pollution among residents and policymakers.”
This now means that your project may involve building a data center and an adjacent power plant, and we all know how complicated, time-consuming, and expensive building a power plant is.
An existing building’s electrical wiring and HVAC systems will almost always need to be torn out and completely replaced. New fire suppression systems will need to be installed.
The exact rate of water consumption is disputed, but it is hard to argue that data centers do not consume a considerable amount of water; large data centers can use up to 5 million gallons of water daily, according to the EPA. An office building with 300 employees uses just 4,500 to 6,000 gallons per day. Converting an existing building to a data center is likely to require taking out all the existing plumbing and replacing it.
What’s more, giant racks of servers and computer equipment are often bigger and heavier than what you’d usually find in an office building, like desks, cubicles, and conference room tables. A data center may need “reinforced floors capable of supporting heavy equipment.” The facility will need considerable space for the power systems and cooling systems.
The cooling systems — which account for about 38 to 40 percent of electricity consumption in a data center — are not something a builder can skimp on. Back in 2022, Twitter (now X) found its cooling system couldn’t cope with a heat wave, and a key facility shut down for a period:
“On September 5th, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento (SMF) datacenter region due to extreme weather. The unprecedented event resulted in the total shutdown of physical equipment in SMF,” Carrie Fernandez, the company’s vice president of engineering, said in an internal message to Twitter engineers on Friday.
Building a data center also requires lots of human beings, and those building the site must have knowledge and experience that is different from a typical construction site:
Unlike conventional commercial construction projects, data centers require large numbers of specialized workers. You can’t simply rely on standard commercial construction crews for this stuff; you need highly specialized tradesmen, like electricians, high-voltage technicians, fiber-optic installers, HVAC specialists, controls engineers, and commissioning teams, among many others. Huge swaths of these jobs require years of training and experience, making it difficult for the labor pool to expand as quickly as AI investment has ballooned.
The problem has become serious enough that some technology companies have begun funding workforce development efforts directly. Earlier this year, Meta partnered with CBRE on a training initiative intended to help expand the pipeline of workers qualified for data center construction and operations, reflecting concerns that labor shortages could eventually slow deployment schedules.
Even before data centers became the villain du jour, they usually required more intense security than a typical office building. When government officials talk about protecting “critical infrastructure,” this is one part of what they mean. One case of a threat to a data center in 2021 involved a former January 6 protester:
Then [Seth Aaron] Pendley sent his contact a hand-drawn map of one facility in particular: the Amazon Web Services center at Smith Switch Road in Ashburn, Virginia (about 35 miles northwest of Washington D.C.). A giant, monochrome, three-warehouse facility best known for catching fire in 2015. Drawn onto the map were indications of where he would enter and exit the premises. He also mentioned that he was going to paint his car, and switch its license plate, to avoid identification by law enforcement.
In March, the plot ramped up. Pendley’s partner arranged a meeting with an explosives supplier for the 31st. Pendley explained to the supplier why he was doing what he was doing:
“The main objective is to f*** up the Amazon servers,” he said, because they were the ones servicing the FBI, CIA, and other government agencies. “The oligarchy” would be angered, causing them to overreact in retaliation. Their overreaction would, in turn, alert the American people to how they were living in an unjust “dictatorship,” and inspire them to rise up. “[S]ome of the people that are on the fence [will] jump off the fence.”
Seth Aaron Pendley was arrested and pled guilty to “malicious attempt to destroy a building with an explosive.” In October 2021, he was sentenced to ten years in federal prison.
Your data center site is going to need some serious security beyond locked doors or a security guard at the front desk. You’re going to need vehicle barriers, probably a fence, CCTV cameras, internal electronic locks, etc. And that’s just physical security; we haven’t even gotten to cybersecurity and firewalls. Somebody hacking in and shutting down your coolant systems could shut down your whole operation.
Some might be saying at this point, “Then build data centers in the middle of nowhere!” And indeed, more data centers are being built in rural areas; three-quarters of planned data centers are being built in the South and Midwest. However, longer distances to and from the data center can slow down the movement of data. The typical consumer might not notice it, but some businesses will. According to a study by Rice University:
“Customer proximity matters because some sectors cannot absorb delay. In critical operations, even slight pauses can have real consequences. For hospital systems, lag can affect performance and risk exposure. And in high-frequency trading, milliseconds can determine whether value is captured or lost in a transaction.
“For industries where speed is everything, being too far from the physical infrastructure can meaningfully affect performance and risk,” said Pan Fang, an assistant professor of strategic management. “Proximity isn’t optional for sectors that can’t absorb delay.”
Then there are the supply chain challenges for all the stuff inside the building: “Every data center requires three categories of electrical equipment to function. Transformers step voltage down from the transmission grid to levels the facility can use. Switchgear distributes power safely across the building. Batteries smooth load spikes and provide backup during grid interruptions.”
The U.S. simply can’t manufacture enough transformers, switchgear, and batteries to keep up with demand. As Bloomberg reported in April:
Almost half of the US data centers planned for this year are expected to be delayed or canceled. One big reason is the shortage of electrical equipment, such as transformers, switchgear and batteries. They are needed not just for powering AI, but also for building out the grid that is seeing increased consumption from electric cars and heat pumps. US manufacturing capacity for these devices cannot keep up with demand, and the scarcity has caused data center builders to rely on imports. . . .
Electrification is a key solution to both tackling climate change and powering AI ambitions. But America’s AI prowess on computer chips and cutting-edge software is being hamstrung by the country’s inability to manufacture the electrical parts. “There’s not enough domestic capacity to go around, so people are pretty much forced to go to the export market,” says Benjamin Boucher, senior analyst with Wood Mackenzie.
Electrical infrastructure adds up to less than 10 percent of the total cost of the data center, but it’s impossible to build the operation without it. “If one piece of your supply chain is delayed, then your whole project can’t deliver,” says Andrew Likens, Crusoe’s energy and infrastructure lead. “It is a pretty wild puzzle at the moment.”
Last year, U.S. companies imported $653 billion in data center equipment. There is a smidgen of good news here, in that we are becoming less dependent upon China for these components:
Where these goods originate has changed substantially. In 2020, China was the largest single supplier of data center equipment to the United States, accounting for 41 percent of imports by value. By 2025, that share had fallen to 11 percent. Taiwan ($159 billion), Mexico ($142 billion), and Vietnam ($86 billion) have emerged as the dominant suppliers. The shift reflects the cumulative impact of Section 301 tariffs, IEEPA tariffs, and export controls on advanced semiconductors. . . . The result is a supply chain that has largely decoupled from China for finished computing hardware.
That’s the good news. The bad news is data centers use lithium-ion batteries to ensure an uninterrupted power supply. And the U.S. is still heavily dependent upon China for lithium-ion batteries. “U.S. Census Bureau data show that total lithium-ion battery imports nearly quintupled from $4.8 billion in 2020 to $23.8 billion in 2024. China’s share of those imports by value rose from 44 percent in 2020 to a peak of 71 percent in 2023, before declining to 69 percent in 2024 and 59 percent in 2025 as tariffs began to take effect.”
Add it all up, and building a new data center requires a location that is preferably not in the middle of nowhere, with access to a massive amount of electricity and water, with space for major power and coolant components, in a building either built to specifications or likely heavily overhauled from its intended use, with major physical and cybersecurity, built by a limited pool of skilled labor, and with a reliable supply for all the transformers, switchgear, and batteries inside.
Considering all this, it’s kind of amazing that any data center ever gets built.
Because some people have problems with reading comprehension, notice I have not written, “Therefore, we should not build data centers.” I am simply laying out the major logistical challenges and pointing out why we should not be surprised to see the rate of data center construction slow down.
Even if we had political unity behind the idea that our economic growth will require much more energy production and much more data center construction to keep the AI economic boom going — which we clearly do not! — our tech companies would still face all these challenges.
A better and more productive discourse would focus on cold, hard facts like the ones listed above. Or we can sit around and argue about whether “Google is changing the weather.”
ADDENDUM: Both Time and the New York Times offered, “What to read after watching The Odyssey” articles.