Pull up satellite imagery of New Carlisle, Indiana, from 2023 and you see farmland. Pull it up today and you see seven rectangular data centers with 23 more permitted. A single campus there already draws over 500 megawatts, enough to power several hundred thousand homes. When the full build finishes, the load will exceed what two cities the size of Atlanta consume.
The Atlantic's Matteo Wong reported from these sites, including Memphis, where a new data center megaproject sits downwind from an active natural-gas plant in a neighborhood already dealing with pollution from decades of industrial use. KeShaun Pearson, who runs the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, told Wong the area's air already tastes like soot and asphalt. Another facility won't improve things.
The numbers at a national level tell the same story. U.S. data centers consumed 176 terawatt-hours in 2023, roughly 4.4% of total national electricity. Globally, the figure hit 415 TWh in 2024 and is projected to double to 945 TWh by 2030. AI-related capital spending now accounts for 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025, and the tech sector has ballooned from 22% to a third of the S&P 500 since ChatGPT launched. That concentration of economic activity in a single sector, built on a single resource constraint, should make anyone in infrastructure planning pay attention.
Cooling is the bottleneck inside the bottleneck. Forty percent of a data center's electricity goes to thermal management. At the densities AI training requires, the cooling problem scales faster than the compute problem.