100% Agree @GavinSBaker. Now, I'm going to debunk every single piece of mis-information about data centers that I've ever seen online: > DISINFORMATION: Data centers use a lot of water. FACT: Most AI data centers are closed loop dry cooler design that barely consume any water at all. A 20MW 10,000 GPU cluster needs 20,000 gallons to charge and doesn't use material water after that. That's less than 1/4 of the amount of water used to raise the amount of beef the average American consumes in a year. That means one of the largest data centers in the world, at 2GW, consumes less water than 20 people's annual beef consumption or three American's total water footprint (@ ~600k gallons per year for the average American). > DISINFORMATION: Data centers increase electricity prices. FACT: Data centers bring down a community's average electricity bill because they spur development of new power generation. Most data centers bring their own power generation, pay fees to the utility to build more power plants, or bring their own power storage to actually reduce the cost of energy in their community. Northern Virginia has some of the most data centers per capita and has low power costs. See research from the Electric Power Research Institute marketplace.org/story/2026/0… and arxiv.org/pdf/2606.19777. >DISINFORMATION: Data centers don't create jobs FACT: Data centers create hundreds of jobs at construction and a high number of exceptionally high paying jobs (many over $120k/year) for their ongoing operation and maintenance. No, they're not similar to an automotive plant in terms of the jobs / MW but they are phenomenal additions to an industrial park and community. > DISINFORMATION: Data centers are constantly super noisy FACT: Data centers are one of the quietest industrial buildings in the world. Drive by a data center in your city and roll down your window. They are very quiet. In fact, a metal mill is FAR louder than a data center---up to 10,000,000 more sound energy is produced by a mill and perceptually a mill can be 128x louder than a data center. > DISINFORMATION: Data centers emit noise pollution from diesel engines running all the time. FACT: Emergency generator sets are almost never turned on unless the grid connection goes out. This would be less than 0.5% of the time! > DISINFORMATION: Data centers are surveillance systems FACT: Data centers actually just host computers owned by private companies that are used to make phone calls, access the internet, run ChatGPT, Claude, X, Instagram, Facebook, Google, play multiplayer video games, and every thing you ever do online. That's it. > DISINFORMATION: Data centers make water dirty FACT: AOC held up a bottle of dirty water and said this is what data centers do. Completely false, well water disruption is a rare side effect of EVERY construction site in the history of humanity. This is not at all unique to data centers and is a complete red herring. > DISINFORMATION: Data centers get massive tax breaks and drain tax dollars from towns FACT: Data centers pay massive amounts of tax and often times huge % of an annual budget of a county or town! It's an absolute bonanza for the towns that are lucky enough to welcome a data center. New schools, new roads, new services are all paid for. Even if there is a sales tax rebate we're still talking tens of millions of new tax revenue. In 2022, Virginia’s data centers collectively generated $1 billion in local tax revenue and $640 million in state tax revenue! That was 2022. netchoice.org/wp-content/upl… Feel free to reply here if you have any other question you'd like answered about data centers happy to provide actual facts.

People are realizing that building the software was never the hard part.