Marketplace All-in-One What happens when a data center moves to town?
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Jul 22, 2025 Landon Marston, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech, joins to discuss the burgeoning demand for data centers, highlighting their hefty energy and water requirements. He reveals how these facilities impact local resources, especially in communities with limited supplies. The conversation also ventures into sustainability innovations that could alleviate some of these challenges. Additionally, listeners gain insights into Medicaid cuts and the concept of '100-year floods,' unraveling misconceptions and inviting personal reflections.
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What Data Centers Are
- Data centers are massive physical buildings that store and process digital information from devices like phones and laptops.
- These buildings are the backbone of the digital world but require large amounts of energy and water.
Data Centers' Huge Energy Use
- Data centers consume significant electricity; about 4.4% of U.S. electricity is used by data centers.
- This demand is expected to grow rapidly, potentially reaching 6.7% to 12% by the year 2028.
Data Centers' Water Use Explained
- While data centers’ water use is small nationally (around 0.1 to 0.5%), they use significant water locally.
- Water is used indirectly for electricity generation and directly for cooling data centers, mainly for dissipating heat from servers.
