"It begins quietly, as many stories do, in a small rural town where the horizon seems impossibly broad. The town planning commission gathers in a modest room, the air thick with the scent of burnt coffee and aged carpet, to hear that their town will soon win the modern economy: 10 new data centers within the town's boundaries. Not just one or two, but 10."
"Sure, there will be jobs. But not the jobs that rebuild a town's soul. Data centers don't employ thousands once they're up; they employ dozens, sometimes fewer, depending on how automated the operation is. The real impact isn't people-it's power, land, transmission capacity, and water. When you drop 10 massive facilities into a small grid, demand spikes don't just happen inside the fence line. They ripple outward."
Municipalities often pursue clusters of data centers with promises of jobs, investment, and a larger tax base. Those facilities create relatively few long-term jobs and instead impose large demands on power, land, transmission capacity, and water resources. Utilities face higher peak loads and must upgrade substations, transmission lines, and generation capacity, shifting costs onto local ratepayers or deferring other infrastructure projects. Large-scale cooling amplifies water stress and creates competition with agricultural users. Excessive speculative building can produce short-term construction activity but risks overcapacity and a subsequent bust if actual digital adoption and sustained demand fail to materialize.
Read at InfoWorld
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