SP/COMPUTE · The Record

The truth about modern data centers.

Most of what people fear about data centers describes machines from twenty years ago. Here is what the current generation actually does, category by category. Every claim below traces to operator filings, interconnection rules, or published engineering standards.

Water

The myth

All data centers drain millions of gallons of drinking water every day and waste it permanently.

The engineering reality

Cooling architectures vary widely. Older evaporative towers do consume potable water. Modern hyperscale and AI facilities predominantly run closed-loop liquid systems, air-cooled chillers, or direct-to-chip loops that fill once and recirculate indefinitely, with zero continuous evaporative loss. Where water is used at all, many operators run reclaimed greywater rather than drinking supplies.

Energy

The myth

Data centers crash local grids and send household bills through the roof.

The engineering reality

A campus can draw 50 to 500 MW, which is exactly why the rules are strict: industrial tariffs require operators to fund their own substations, transmission lines, and interconnection. Where power gets tight, the cause is a grid that stopped building generation and wires. A customer that pays for both is part of the cure.

Noise

The myth

They sound like jet engines, around the clock, for miles.

The engineering reality

The loud parts are rooftop chillers and backup diesel generators. The generators run about twenty minutes a month in tests, or during a grid outage. With acoustic baffling, sound-attenuation louvers, and perimeter barriers, boundary noise stays below typical industrial and suburban zoning limits, often under 55 dBA at the property edge.

Heat

The myth

They blast extreme heat into neighborhoods and heat the local climate.

The engineering reality

Server exhaust leaves at roughly 30 to 40°C, low-grade warmth that dissipates quickly into the atmosphere with zero chemical emissions. In dense European districts the same heat is now captured through exchangers and piped into district heating for homes, pools, and offices.

Jobs & economy

The myth

Ghost warehouses that take land and subsidies and employ nobody.

The engineering reality

Operations run on 50 to 150 specialized technicians, engineers, and security staff per campus. Construction runs for years and employs thousands of trades. And the property and business taxes are the quiet part: they fund schools and municipal services for decades.

What happens to the towns that say yes.

Loudoun County · Virginia

More than two hundred data centers pay a computer-equipment tax that grew from $466 million in 2022 to about $795 million in 2026. The county cut its property tax rate ten years in a row while revenues rose. The data centers paid, so the citizens paid less.

Loudoun County adopted budgets, FY 2022–2026

Santa Clara · California

The city runs its own municipal utility, and public power priced well below the regional monopoly drew several dozen data centers into a few square miles of Silicon Valley. Their electricity purchases and taxes anchor a city budget its neighbors envy.

City of Santa Clara · Silicon Valley Power

Richland Parish · Louisiana

Meta's $27 billion data center roughly doubled parish sales-tax receipts before it even opened. The school district began paying certified teachers bonuses of up to $50,000, more than a full year's median salary in the parish.

The Wall Street Journal, 2026 · parish records

Who is building.

The most consequential countries on Earth, the ones with the smartest citizens and the deepest capital, are building data centers and AI factories as fast as they can pour the concrete.