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October 7, 2026 10 min read

Getting to Know Data Centers: Is That a Lot? Compared to What?

Getting to Know Data Centers: William Floyd beside a cutaway illustration of a data center, its power and cooling lines glowing

You’ve already used a data center today. Every search, photo, message and video call runs through one. And yet about three out of four Americans don’t want one built near them.

Most of the arguments for and against leave out one thing: proportion. So we made a film about it. Getting to Know Data Centers follows one search from your phone into a data center, then lines up its water and power against the rest of American life. Every number in it is sourced.

The narration is an AI recreation of William Floyd’s own voice, used with his consent. The script, research and sources are Vista’s.

Before we go further, you should know who’s telling you this. We’re Vista Site Selection. We help decide where buildings like these go, so yes, we have a stake in this. But no developer or tech company paid for this film, and none of them reviewed it.

How a data center works

When you search for something on your phone, that search leaves as pulses of light, riding through fiber-optic cable to a building like the ones in the film. From the outside, a data center isn’t much to look at: a long box with almost no windows. Data and a lot of electricity go in. Answers and a whole lot of heat come out.

Inside, it’s row after row of computers called servers, stacked in cabinets called racks. A simple search typically takes less electricity than running your TV for the same amount of time. Making an AI video can take hundreds, even thousands of times more. Multiply that by billions of requests a day, around the clock, and a single new campus can need anywhere from 100 to 1,000 megawatts of power. Add up every data center in Virginia and you get about 5,000 megawatts, roughly what 2 million Virginia homes need.

That power comes from the same grid that powers your house: a power plant, high-voltage lines, then a substation where transformers step the voltage down. If the grid goes down, batteries keep everything running until the backup diesel generators kick in. In Virginia, the average site has 54 of them.

Nearly every watt a server uses ends up as heat, and getting rid of that heat takes power too. On average it’s about half again what the computers themselves use. Google says it has gotten its own down to about a tenth. Many sites send the heat out through cooling towers that work the way you do on a hot day: they sweat. About 80% of that water evaporates, and the rest goes down the drain.

Keeping count is part of our job. Through Vista Site Selection data center tracking, we follow more than 15,000 listings in 180 countries, about 6,000 of them in the U.S. More are in Virginia than in any other state.

How much water do data centers use?

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says every data center in the country used about 17 billion gallons of water on-site in a year. That sounds like a lot. So the film lines it up against other things:

  • Leaky water pipes: about 6 billion gallons a day, according to the nation’s civil engineers. That’s almost 10 times what every data center uses, power plants and all.
  • Leaks inside our homes: nearly a trillion gallons a year, the EPA says. In about six days, those leaks waste what every data center in America uses on-site in a whole year.
  • Showers: about 1.2 trillion gallons a year, according to the EPA. About five days to match a year of data centers.
  • Drinking water: the CDC says the average American adult drinks about 44 ounces a day. Across the country, we drink about twice as much water as every data center in America uses on-site.
  • Lawns and gardens: about 8 billion gallons a day, the EPA says, and as much as half of it is wasted. That matches a year of data centers in about two days.
  • Golf courses use about 30 times more than data centers, and farm irrigation about 1,600 times more.

Or picture the Georgia Aquarium, with more than 11 million gallons. Every data center in America goes through an aquarium’s worth of water on-site about every five and a half hours. Leaky pipes and faucets in our homes do it about every six minutes.

Nobody’s saying stop showering or stop farming. The point is proportion. And proportion cuts both ways: water is abundant globally, but it can be scarce locally. The High Plains aquifer has dropped by about 93 trillion gallons since the 1950s, the USGS says, mostly from irrigation. In a town like The Dalles, one company used 29% of the city’s water. So the answer isn’t “don’t build.” It’s build where the water is, and show the math.

How much electricity do data centers use?

Nationally, data centers use around 4 or 5% of America’s electricity. Zoom into a county like Loudoun, and that share gets a lot bigger.

America’s demand for electricity has always come in waves: wartime industry, the postwar boom of fridges, TVs and air conditioning, then the nuclear build-out of the seventies and eighties. Then, around 2007, demand went flat. For about 15 years, growth was basically zero, and when demand is flat, nobody builds. The grid got old. The Department of Energy says the big transformers that run it average about 40 years old, and in 2019 more than 80% of new ones were imported.

Data centers changed that. America’s utilities now plan to invest about $1.4 trillion by 2030, according to their own industry group. In 2025, the country added more new power plants than in any year since 2002 and set a new record for electricity use.

Some of that new power is nuclear. Three Mile Island’s undamaged reactor is scheduled to come back in 2027, with Microsoft buying its power for 20 years. Google is helping bring Iowa’s Duane Arnold plant back online. Meta alone has signed for up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear. And somebody has to run those plants: the Department of Energy says tripling nuclear by 2050 would take about 375,000 more workers.

Why it matters: energy is life. A Lawrence Livermore study of 60 countries found that no country using less than about 4,000 kilowatt-hours per person reached the top tier of the UN’s Human Development Index. Americans use about 12,000. More than 600 million people still live with no electricity at all.

For how power shapes where data centers can go, read Evan Stair’s data center site selection guide.

Neighbors, jobs and the build

Up close, what neighbors notice first is the noise. Many of the early data centers in Virginia went up right next to neighborhoods. The new ones are mostly going somewhere else: JLL says 77% of what’s under construction is in markets that had almost no data centers 10 years ago, places like West Texas and rural Louisiana. And counties like Fairfax now require big setbacks and noise studies.

The honest version on jobs: Meta’s campus in Louisiana will need about 7,500 builders at its peak and about 1,000 people to run it, according to the state. A typical Virginia site employs about 50. The permanent jobs are real, but small. The building is the big story, and so are the taxes: in Loudoun, data centers paid about $1.2 billion in property taxes last year, 39% of the county’s budget.

The Census Bureau says data center construction is running at a record $85 billion a year, up 73% in a single year. Every site pulls on a chain. Before a shovel hits the ground, there are surveyors, soil engineers, wetland scientists and floodplain managers. Then the copper, concrete, cable and excavators. Caterpillar says its power generation sales are up, primarily because of data centers. Hitachi is building the nation’s largest transformer plant in southern Virginia, with 825 jobs. And the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects lineworker jobs to grow 10%, naming data centers as part of the reason.

What it’s for

People take about two trillion photos a year, and they live in buildings like these. Lose your phone and you don’t lose your memories. We’ve lost knowledge before: the Library of Alexandria faded over centuries because people stopped keeping it up, and it took 2,000 years and an MIT lab to recover how the Romans made their concrete. Data centers are how we stop forgetting.

They also changed how we work. Today, about a quarter of all paid workdays in America happen at home, WFH Research says. And AI is learning on top of all that knowledge:

  • In a Swedish trial of more than 100,000 women, radiologists working with AI found 29% more breast cancers, with no rise in false alarms.
  • AlphaFold has predicted the shapes of more than 200 million proteins, and it won a Nobel Prize.
  • Europe’s weather agency runs an AI forecast that beats the old models on many measures, with about 1,000 times less energy.
  • Google’s AI flood forecasts give five days of warning in more than 80 countries.
  • In California, AI cameras spotted fires before the first 911 call for more than half of the fires they flagged last year.
  • At Johns Hopkins, an AI sepsis alert cut deaths by almost 19% when doctors acted on it fast.

We’ve been here before. In 1889, a lineman was electrocuted in front of a crowd in New York, and people were scared of electricity. It spread anyway. By the 1950s, nine in ten farms had power, and electrification was named the greatest engineering achievement of the century.

Where it goes from here

In 1946, ENIAC, one of the first computers, filled a room about the size of a house, weighed 30 tons and ran on punch cards. The phone in your pocket is millions of times faster. For 80 years, the amount of computing we get from the same electricity has kept doubling, and a few companies are already putting small computing nodes on people’s homes, where the power already is.

That’s our prediction, with a caveat: every time computing got cheaper, we used more of it. Nobody can promise the big buildings go away. But if the last 80 years are any guide, today’s data center is tomorrow’s pocket.

How to get to yes

The way to win this race is to build data centers right:

  • Pay for your own power.
  • Prove the clean power, hour by hour.
  • Show your water math, in public.
  • Keep it quiet at night.
  • Put the terms in public, before the vote.

Do that, and the answer can be yes. So before the next one is built near you, don’t just ask whether. Ask how. Who pays for the power? Where does the water come from? And who gets told?

Weighing a data center project, or deciding where one should go? See our data center site selection services or contact us.

Frequently asked questions

How much water do data centers use?

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says every data center in the United States used about 17 billion gallons of water on-site in a year. That’s about one Georgia Aquarium’s worth (more than 11 million gallons) every five and a half hours, for all U.S. data centers combined.

Do data centers use more water than leaky pipes?

No. America’s water pipes leak about 6 billion gallons a day, according to the nation’s civil engineers. That’s almost 10 times what every U.S. data center uses, including the water used by the power plants that supply them. Water can still be scarce locally, which is why where a data center draws its water matters.

How much electricity do data centers use?

Nationally, data centers use around 4 or 5% of America’s electricity, with much higher shares in counties like Loudoun, Virginia. A single new campus can need anywhere from 100 to 1,000 megawatts. All of Virginia’s data centers together use about 5,000 megawatts, roughly what 2 million Virginia homes need.

Are nuclear plants restarting because of data centers?

Some are. Three Mile Island’s undamaged reactor is scheduled to restart in 2027, with Microsoft buying its power for 20 years. Google is helping bring Iowa’s Duane Arnold plant back online, and Meta has signed for up to 6.6 gigawatts of nuclear.

What should a community ask before a data center is built?

Ask how, not just whether. Who pays for the power? Where does the water come from, and is that water scarce locally? Who gets told, and are the terms public before the vote? Projects that pay for their own power, prove their clean power, show their water math and keep noise down can earn a yes.

Who made Getting to Know Data Centers?

Vista Site Selection, a site selection consultancy. No developer or tech company paid for or reviewed the film. The narration is an AI recreation of William Floyd’s voice, used with his consent, and every number in the film is sourced.

More from the film

Sources

Every number in the film and in this post is sourced: 92 sources, grouped as in the film’s credits.

Show all 92 sources

How It Works

Water

Power

Jobs and The Build

What It’s For

The Race

Getting It Right

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