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.
The grid cannot keep up. Indiana's regulatory environment has been friendly to data center development so far, but 500 MW is one campus. The full permitted buildout would require power commitments that compete directly with residential and industrial users across the region. Local opposition is already forming, and the state has no history of managing energy conflicts at this scale.
The New Carlisle campus gets built, but not all of it. Expect 15 to 18 of the 30 planned facilities to come online by 2029. The rest stall on a combination of grid interconnection delays and state-level political pressure as energy costs for surrounding communities start climbing. Indiana does not block the project outright, but the regulatory environment shifts from permissive to adversarial once the first round of rate increases hits residential ratepayers. The era of building data centers wherever the land is cheap and the politicians are friendly is ending. New Carlisle will be one of the last projects to get approved at this scale without a dedicated power source attached to the application.