Data centers are large, climate controlled, facilities for managing, processing, and storing data. They are used for everything from AI to online shopping to off-site data backups to high performance computing. Data center equipment hosts cloud services, websites, applications, and databases.
While they enable amazing things – we must ensure that that are good citizens of Georgia. Currently we are not asking them to be good neighbors, and thus, they are taking advantage of us.
Steps to being good neighbors
They are taking more than they are giving because we aren’t asking for them to be good neighbors. But they want our land, our power, and our water. Let’s ask for something in return.
Helpful public opinion polls – US views of how data centers affect the environment, energy costs, jobs and more | Pew Research Center | 12 Mar, 2026
Map of Data Centers
The above map shows data centers and crypto mines as of March 2026.
The black icons represent completed data centers, and the orange data centers in progress. A number over the icon represents more than one data center; these will ‘separate out’ as you zoom in on the map using the “+” symbol in the bottom right.
The yellow triangles represent known Crypto Mines – which are not Data Centers – but still energy and water superconsumers.
If you would like to interact with the map – click here.
The chart below is accurate as of Mar 2026.
The Human Impact
Educational Video on Data Centers
0:02
Hey y’all, my name’s Doctor Amy Sharma and I am the executive director of Science for Georgia.
0:08
I’ve been giving a lot of data center presentations these days and I thought I would record one so that way y’all can have the audio with the visual in case people would like to experience this presentation.
0:21
Not going to be nearly as funny as when I do it in person, but we will soldier on.
0:28
A little bit about science for Georgia.
0:30
We are a nonprofit science advocacy organization.
0:35
We work very hard to get science out of the lab and onto the streets.
0:39
That means we offer science communication training.
0:42
We do outreach events, mainly centered for adults.
0:45
So we do Georgia Science Junction and climate survival trainings, and we host community forums and town halls.
0:53
And then we’re advocating to assure that science has a seat at the table.
0:59
We have a Thriving Data for Georgia program, which really takes data and connects human health to environmental health.
1:09
So that way we can provide communities with the information that they need to make the case that something is going on in their community.
1:19
A little bit about me, I have a PhD from Duke University.
1:25
A long time ago in my early years I was a microprocessor designer at IBM.
1:33
So about data centers, I am slightly more qualified to talk about them.
1:45
OK, so today we’re going to talk about what are data centers, What are the known knowns, what are the known unknowns, and what are the unknown unknowns?
1:53
And then I will leave you with some solutions on how we can make them good neighbors.
1:58
So let’s dive in.
2:00
What are data centers?
2:03
Data centers make possible the cloud. All the photos you got stored on your phone and in your computer and sharing and all of those things happen because we have the cloud and the cloud has to reside somewhere.
2:18
They also support small businesses.
2:21
I work for a couple startups.
2:22
There’s no way we could have gotten the hardware possible if we hadn’t been just buying space and renting space on data center cloud storage.
2:32
And they also are, are the reason.
2:36
Well, they’re, they’re really booming now because of the artificial intelligence explosion.
2:41
But, you know, we kind of did this to ourselves.
2:45
If you wanted to take a guess at how many connected devices are in a home.
2:49
We will pause here…
2:51
Think of a number.
2:53
It’s about 21.
2:55
So that includes all the phones, computers, gaming systems, thermostats, light bulbs, toasters, fridges.
3:01
I mean they’re all connected to the cloud, and they’ve all got to send data somewhere, but they are really like nothing we have seen before.
3:10
They are giant boxes. Huge warehouse sized buildings and in them are compute technology.
3:20
So that’s where all the algorithms in the computers are doing their little computer work.
3:25
Those are hooked up to storage devices.
3:27
So that’s all the hard disk drives that are holding all your cat videos.
3:31
And then there’s network devices to get the data to and from the storage devices to the compute technology, but then also back out into the real world.
3:41
And then all of this generates a ton of heat, right?
3:46
Your laptop sitting on your lap gets hot.
3:48
Imagine that times a million.
3:50
And so there are enormous quantities of HVAC’s and chilling systems in these buildings.
3:57
And yes, they look like a factory, and they take up the footprint of a factory, but they employ about 30 to 50 people after they have been built.
4:11
There’s nothing in them, right?
4:12
Like we’re all doing this work remotely.
4:15
So they employ less than your average McDonald’s.
4:19
And so as they’re coming to your community, really think about how many incentives you want to bring a McDonald’s size employer to your community.
4:32
Here are some quotes. CEOs of the big device companies are all agreeing it’s out with white collar jobs and in with blue collar jobs.
4:44
So they, we keep saying they’re driving the economy of the future.
4:49
But the CEO of NVIDIA said if you’re an electrician, you’re a plumber, you’re a carpenter, we’re going to need hundreds and thousands of them to build all these factories.
4:59
Once these factories are built, though, there’s no jobs in the factories.
5:04
So we are creating transient construction jobs.
5:09
Here are some more fast facts. Why do they keep coming for us in Georgia?
5:13
We are very attractive to data centers because we have cheap land, power, and water.
5:20
And we’ve spent a lot of time in the last 15 years connecting the state to the Internet.
5:27
We have really good broadband.
5:30
And unlike the other hotspots around the country, Georgia is considered water rich.
5:36
So here we are.
5:38
We’ve created this perfect storm.
5:41
But think about this data center needs parallel our needs. Ahen it is hot outside and your air conditioner is cranked up.
5:51
Think about it, their air conditioner is cranked up.
5:54
They need more power and water precisely when we need more power and water.
5:59
And because it is a great attractive spot for data centers, according to some people I know who work at Georgia Tech, most of the data centers in the state are premium data centers.
6:11
So therefore they’re at a price point that small Georgia businesses can’t really afford.
6:17
All right, so let’s start digging into what data centers are and let’s talk about what we know about these things.
6:35
The first thing we know about these things is that just like everybody else, engineers are trying to get things done in the easiest and the fastest and the cheapest way that they can do it.
6:48
And so that is why data centers are gravitating to Georgia, because we have cheap land, power, and water and because we can just throw these things up willy nilly everywhere.
6:59
The plan of attack from all the big companies is akin to the Russian battle solution.
7:06
They are just throwing bodies at the problem. Because you can just get all the land, power, and water that you need. Why bother to create efficient algorithms?
7:16
Why bother to create more efficient cooling systems?
7:20
None of these things matter because, capitalism.
7:24
And why blame them?
7:30
Another thing we know is that it’s a very variable, volatile, market.
7:37
They’re kind of like locusts.
7:39
They come in, they take all the cheap land, power, and water that they can, and then they move on to the next state that has cheap land, power, and water.
7:47
And as they start to get priced out, or they start to run out of resources, or they start to run into community opposition, they just move to the next market.
7:56
This this chart here from McKinsey shows the black spots are saturated markets already.
8:03
So that’s Virginia, Chicago, Dallas, and Northern California.
8:08
Atlanta’s considered a secondary market, or it was about 12 months ago when this graph was made.
8:15
But you can see that
8:18
The light blue dots are the emerging markets, and you can see they’re popping up in North Carolina and South Carolina because we’re starting to run out of land, power, and water here in Georgia.
8:30
So while these data centers are showing signs of being variable and pretty easy to move around. Here in Georgia, we are just planning like the party is just never going to end.
8:44
Georgia Power has proposed to double our power generation by 2031.
8:50
About a week and a half ago, early in December. The Georgia Public Service Commission approved A10 GW expansion and most of this is for data centers.
9:08
A few more details here about the current expansion and the current approved plans. (Both this slide and the previous chart are from our friends at Southern Environmental Law Center.)
9:26
Here’s where the expansion requests are going to go.
9:29
And you can see that about five gigawatts of it is going to be for gas powered plants and another 1.2 is for a different type of gas powered plant.
9:42
So approximately 6.5 gigawatts of this are going to come from new or upgraded gas powered turbines.
9:57
And, fun fact, Southern Company, who owns Georgia Power, and also owns the regional gas infrastructure, has proposed to expand a lot of the gas pipelines around the Southeast, including the SSE4 pipeline that is coming from Columbus to Augusta.
10:21
And rate increases. Yes, there’s been about a $43 a month bill increase on our bills for Georgia Power customers for over the past 18 months or so.
10:34
Most of this was for previous expansion that had already been planned and approved.
10:40
So none of this new expansion is currently sitting on our current power bills.
10:45
And there’s a lot of speculation about how much of this will be paid for by the new incoming data centers, and how much of this will be left to the consumer.
10:57
So what is it doing to your power bill?
11:00
So there’s been a couple studies done that show that in some states with the most data centers, electricity bills are surging.
11:11
Bank of America reported that rising utility bills are linked to data center construction.
11:21
So that’s your power bill.
11:22
But people are asking, “Well, what do these things do to the environment and the community that I live in?”
11:28
So in the immediate vicinity of these, we’re talking about noise and light pollution. If they are not properly constructed, or not built up to code,
11:44
We’re talking water runoff and some other issues.
11:49
There’s been reports of… As pressure is building on the water supply people’s wells are ending up with murky water and things like that.
12:00
So there’s a lot of dangers to the local water system.
12:04
And what we’ve also started to hear is once these things get turned on, they produce a low-level hum and a low-level hum has been linked to increased stress.
12:15
And if you are under increased stress 24/7, you actually start to go insane.
12:20
And you can also have cardiac issues as well.
12:24
So that’s your immediate vicinity. When the power goes out again, they need to run 24/7 and so they crank up their generators.
12:34
And right now a lot of these generators are like diesel generators, right?
12:39
So imagine what happens when a just like a parking lot of generators all cranks up and is running 24/7.
12:48
That is not good for local air quality and also local noise pollution.
12:56
Now, outside the immediate vicinity…
12:57
We’re talking a strain on water resources.
13:00
They do use a lot of water, there is loss of trees cover, and possible impact on property values.
13:08
We have some pictures from our friends in Fayetteville where high tension power lines needed to be run to a new data center. Because of that an eminent domain claim was made…
13:21
We’re talking giant high tension power poles in people’s front yards.
13:26
So the infrastructure also will have an impact on local poverty values.
13:31
And then, big picture, power consumption in Georgia, you just saw we’re proposing 10 more gigawatts and it’s mainly via polluting sources and it is very water intensive.
13:48
So what does this say here about cooling…
13:52
There is talk about closed loop cooling and targeted cooling and things like that.
14:00
So there are things that data centers can do to cut down on the amount of water that they are using by being a little bit more strategic about their cooling strategies.
14:12
It saves some water.
14:13
It does not save all the water.
14:16
And because nothing in life is free, if you cut down on the water, you raise your electricity bill.
14:22
And so, it’s a tradeoff here.
14:25
But what we’re hearing from a lot of places is that if a data center is coming in, the least you need to do is insist on them using closed loop cooling.
14:38
All right, what are the unknowns about data centers?
14:43
What’s going on that we don’t know about?
14:46
So I just gave you that whole list, but we honestly don’t know how many there are, or their locations.
14:54
We don’t have accurate reporting on their power and water usage.
14:58
We don’t know who their power providers are.
15:00
We don’t know the amount of tax revenue that they’re providing to localities and to the state.
15:05
We don’t actually know the job creation.
15:10
They will come in and claim that they have created hundreds of jobs, but no one ever distinguishes in those reports between temporary construction jobs and full-time employment jobs. And there are additional infrastructure demands.
15:23
There’s just a lot of unknowns that are hidden behind NDA’s and trade secrets and other things.
15:30
And so there’s just a complete lack of transparency here.
15:36
So we’ve done our best. Science for Georgia, working with some partners, and then I sent some interns on a scavenger hunt a couple months ago, looking at tax records, DRI filings, the whole deal.
15:53
Here’s where the current and proposed data centers are, that we know of, that Science for Georgia and partners have found as of December 2025.
16:05
So you can see that they’re mainly in the Atlanta area.
16:09
That’s a big 74 covering all of Atlanta.
16:12
They’re starting to spread out from Atlanta.
16:15
If you look at this map, there’s these little yellow triangles.
16:18
Those yellow triangles are crypto mines, which are like a special subset of data centers.
16:24
They’re basically just giant trailers. The cargo container you put on an 18 wheeler.
16:35
They pack them with specialized computing equipment.
16:38
They put these giant air blower fans on them, and they just like pop them up in the middle of the field.
16:44
They’re their own special version of community noise nuisance and they only run Bitcoin mines.
16:54
Here’s our count as we have right now.
16:58
Currently we have about 97 running and operating.
17:04
We have about 42 more that have been planned and announced. There are about 35 crypto mines.
17:12
And you’ll see as they grow, they get spectacularly bigger.
17:19
Data centers have been around for like 20 years
17:22
They were where we did off site storage a long time ago.
17:25
But only in the past like 2 years have these things called ‘hyperscalers’ that have come on the market.
17:29
So you’ll notice current data centers, about 100 of them, are only taking up 44 million square feet.
17:36
The proposed 42 more, those are going to add 116 million square feet
17:41
So these are big guys.
17:42
The total power capacity, if everything that has been announced is built, is another 15 gigawatts, 15!
17:55
I just told you that Georgia Power got approved for another 10 gigawatts.
18:00
Like these are bonkers numbers.
18:03
If you put all of these centers together, existing and planned, that’s about enough to power 10 million homes.
18:10
There’s only 4.6 million housing units in Georgia.
18:14
This is bonkers.
18:15
And then the total water usage is again another 30 billion from the planned data centers.
18:23
All of this combined is about the same water uses of 1.8 million people.
18:31
And so if you look at it, the Savannah metro area is about 431,000.
18:36
So this is just insane amounts of power and water.
18:40
And the reason this is in the known unknowns is because there’s the NDA’s and trade secrets and everything else. These are all just estimates that we have been able to glean either from DRI filings or press releases. Or we used industry standard ways of taking the square footage and the compute power and turning that into water and power usage numbers.
19:04
I would welcome more transparency and then we can get updated facts here.
19:10
But just to put this in perspective, if everybody’s sitting around and they’re like, what is a GW?
19:16
That is a lot?
19:18
All four reactors at Plant Vogtle.
19:20
There’s four nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle that produce approximately 4.6 gigawatts total.
19:30
So each of those reactors is about 1.1 to 1.2 gigawatts.
19:35
Some of these proposed data centers are going to take up a gigawatt of power, which is the entire output capacity of 1 nuclear reactor.
19:48
And data centers create two hits on our water system.
19:51
There’s the direct consumption at the data center itself with the cooling and all those things.
19:59
And then there’s indirect consumption, because in Georgia we rely on coal and gas and nuclear, and all three of those power sources are very water intensive.
20:12
So if you look at this map here shows the States and their indirect water consumption.
20:18
So this is how they get their power and what power sources they use.
20:21
So if you see in the in the West and in the Northwest and then here in the Southeast, we are red. And red means it’s a high water consumption for our power generation.
20:38
What else are we losing?
20:39
Tax revenue.
20:41
Georgia has a sales tax exemption for data centers.
20:47
We also have other construction incentives.
20:49
Sometimes these guys get ad valorem tax incentives to come into various places around Georgia.
20:56
Based on a report from Good Jobs First, an independent organization, Georgia has lost $300 million in tax revenue alone, just in 2025. Just in 2025.
21:18
All right, what do we not know about these things?
21:21
Is it a bubble?
21:23
Growth is very speculative.
21:24
What happens?
21:26
I mean, technology changes in the blink of an eye.
21:29
What happens if they come up with a brand-new algorithm that only needs like a tenth of the space of these current centers?
21:40
What if all this AI hype doesn’t live up to what people actually think?
21:45
For those of us who were, as my daughter says, so last century, does anyone remember the dot com bubble bursting around 2001?
21:57
Is this what’s going to happen here?
21:59
But when these guys fold, we’re stuck with a bunch of empty shells and a lot of stranded assets and a ton of new power generation capacity. And who’s going to be footing the bill for cleaning all that up?
22:13
And just a little bit more about this.
22:16
A Harvard report came out in October of 2025 that showed without data centers, GDP growth was only 0.1% in the first half of 2025.
22:28
So most of our economic growth in the year of 2025 has been driven by data center construction and all of those needs.
22:36
Oh my gosh, shouldn’t we be diversifying like our portfolio or economic portfolio?
22:48
And here’s another fun question that needs to be answered is: “are these things mission critical?”
22:53
So right now data centers go up, they provide services, and people sign what they call service level agreements with them.
23:04
And so the data centers themselves guarantee a certain level of uptime.
23:08
And usually it’s 99.9999% of the time they will be up and running and providing services.
23:14
What happens when we have a drought or a heat wave or an ice storm or a natural disaster?
23:21
Where are these guys in the queue to get back on the power grid and to get back the water supply?
23:28
How many diesel generators are they going to be running while they’re waiting for the power to turn back on?
23:35
My friends in Augusta and Valdosta and like down on the coast after Helene, they didn’t have water for two weeks.
23:44
A lot of them didn’t have power for four weeks.
23:47
Are people not going to get running water or not going to have power turned on as quickly, so that we can have cloud services?
23:55
These are the questions that need to be answered and need to be put in ordinances and contracts as they’re being proposed and built.
24:05
I talked a lot about this, but really AI is here to stay.
24:11
If I disconnect the video game system from the Internet, there will be a riot in my household, right?
24:20
Like we use the Internet, we use the cloud, we use AI.
24:25
But we’ve got to make them be better neighbors.
24:29
Remember I showed you that slide and I said that they were lazy engineers, right?
24:34
There are plenty of power saving technologies that can be implemented right now.
24:39
There are compute enhancements, new efficient programming, new architectures.
24:46
The biggest thing that could happen right now is load balancing.
24:51
So an ironic twist, AI can be used to save AI.
24:56
A study just came out of Duke University that showed if data centers went to load balancing. Which means that they only perform a certain number of operations, and then once they got up to a limit, they just made people wait in line for their services. Rarely does a data center reach its peak operating capacity. Rarely would people be made to wait in line.
25:15
We wouldn’t need hardly any new power generation.
25:18
They could be running right now at a much more efficient clip.
25:21
That would require them, though, to have some sort of get out of jail free card for their service level agreements.
25:28
Because they’re not going to do load balancing until they won’t get dinged on service level agreements because they’re making people wait in line.
25:40
There’s much more intelligent networking and there’s a lot of things that they can do for their cooling systems.
25:45
All of these could really tamp down their power and water needs.
25:49
Like right now.
25:52
There’s some other things that we can do as a state to make them much better neighbors.
25:58
We can provide community protections: making sure infrastructure is paid for by the data centers themselves.
26:06
Also, as data centers roll into town, having them draft up community benefit plans with the community would be great.
26:15
I’ve said multiple times, they don’t bring a lot of jobs, but they do bring tax revenue.
26:20
And it is Google and Meta, and Microsoft, these people have money.
26:27
They you could turn around and have them invest in the town.
26:31
Accountability and transparency.
26:34
We need to coordinate planning statewide.
26:39
These things use as much water as a factory, except, we put in one Hyundai plant, and we’re not going to put in another one nearby, because there’s not going to be enough workers. And all of those other like support services.
26:50
Whereas data centers, like I said, don’t need a lot of workers.
26:55
So you could line them up all in a row.
26:58
That’s like an untenable, unsustainable, way to use power and water.
27:02
We do have water planning districts in the state.
27:07
We do such a good job with our water planning.
27:11
The Chattahoochee, and the Flint, and all of them, know exactly what comes in to their river, and exactly what comes out, and who’s getting what intakes and outtakes along the way.
27:26
And we do this for agricultural uses and other things.
27:29
So what if we added this for industrial uses?
27:32
We also need transparent and uniform reporting.
27:34
Remember I said I don’t know what any of these things are using.
27:38
How can we plan for the future, if we don’t know what they’re taking right now?
27:42
We need to give them responsible incentives.
27:44
Right now they just get tax incentives for showing up in the state.
27:48
They need to be aligned with doing the right thing and working with communities and having sustainable practices.
27:54
And then finally, they claim to be powering the future workforce and the economy of the future.
28:04
All right, well, cool.
28:05
If you’re walking into a town, let’s upgrade the local STEM labs at the at the high schools.
28:12
Let’s provide AI certificates at the local community colleges and TCSGs.
28:18
Let’s have hire local.
28:20
There are a bunch of ways that they could be enhancing the education and workforce around the state.
28:28
And then on a local level. If all of this got you a little nervous, we have a local outreach toolkit with educational materials and flyers and stuff like that.
28:42
And also in concert with a couple of our great partners we’ve put together ideal moratoriums and zoning ordinances. That way they can come in, and they can be good neighbors, and communities are not caught unaware and unprepared when they roll into town.
29:01
We are here to help you as they roll in.
29:06
I really did want to end this on a slight message of hope: Georgia can make the right decision.
29:13
This situation has come out of nowhere.
29:15
It’s been very fast moving.
29:16
And whenever things are very fast moving, sometimes we’re overwhelmed, and things just happen.
29:21
But we can keep up
29:24
And we can make a decision.
29:26
We can keep going right now on the status quo, which is, I think, unsustainable in terms of our power and our water and our depleted resources and taking from communities and not giving back.
29:38
Or we can turn. There are tools right now and ways to make it happen that they can support a thriving tech economy, that they can support thriving communities around Georgia.
29:51
And so it’s up to us as Georgia to call on these data centers and make them be good neighbors.
30:01
I really thank you very much for your time.
30:05
Sorry about the lack of dad jokes in this presentation.
30:10
I’m glad you listened to this.
30:12
If you need anything, here is our toolkits and the map of data centers and resources and everything else are at bit.ly/DataCenterGA.
30:24
And please reach out to us at Science for Georgia.
30:27
We are happy to help out or get you in contact with the right people.
30:32
Thank you very much.
FAQs
We don’t quite know for certain:
–USA Data Centers listed 96 facilities in Georgia in April, 2025 when this page was created, but as of November, 2025 lists 145 facilities. We found that at least 40 of these 145 facilities are renting space within a larger data center location.
–Georgia Data Centers – Providers Map in Georgia, United States – listed 71 facilities in April, 2025 and lists 116 as of November, 2025.
Science for Georgia Interns have confirmed 97.
Approximately 30 permanent jobs at a Data Center – Why data centers fail to bring new jobs to small towns | TechRepublic
Virginia data centers generate just 1 permanent job for every $13 million invested, based on Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) data dating back to 1990. In contrast, it cost a mere $137,000 to create 1 job outside of the data center sector — nearly 100 times less investment.
—Artificial Jobs: The Illusion of Big Tech’s Data Center Employment Claims | Food and Water Watch
This June 2025 study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and North Carolina State University, said that “Data Center Growth Could Increase Electricity Bills 8% Nationally and as Much as 25% in Some Regional Markets“
Why your electric bill is going up faster than a data center’s – The Washington Post | 15 Jan, 2026
Georgia Power bills to rise if PSC approves data center buildout, analysts warn | AJC – 24 Nov, 2025
Electricity bills in states with the most data centers are surging | CNBC – 14 Nov, 2025
Bank of America Report on Rising Utility Bills and Link to Data Centers – 17 Oct, 2025
Data Centers Are Already Increasing Your Energy Bills. We Have the Receipts. – Union of Concerned Scientists – 29 Sept, 2025
LG&E customers could see higher bills under proposed rate hike | Business | wdrb.com – 9 Sept, 2025
Power use can vary – but it can be estimated at about 150 Watts (W) to 300W of power per sq foot.
Thus, using the estimate of 200 W per sq foot – Project Sail at 4.9Million square feet would draw about 980 Megawatts (MW)
For comparison – Georgia Power estimates that 1MW of power can support 450 homes. Thus, Project Sail is about the equivalent of 441,000 homes.
Data center’s power consumption comes from
- Compute technology – millions of computer chips executing algorithms and computations on enormous quantities of data. All this data requires:
- Storage devices – hard disk drives that hold all the data. To get the data and answers back and forth to the data centers and within the data centers there must be:
- Network devices – that provide connectivity. All of these things combine to create a tremendous amount of heat which require complex
- Cooling systems – from AC units to water chillers.
Understanding Data Center Energy Consumption – C&C Technology Group
Science for Georgia has found 97 data centers that are in-use, and an additional 19 more that are in-progress and/or announced.
Total Power Capacity of 68 centers: 6500 MW
Total Power Capacity of 19 planned: 6200 MW
Total in-use and planned: 12,700 MW
From those 97 in-use, we were able to find reported power capacity data for 68 centers, and total square footage for 64 centers (not all the same centers). We then used the square footage from the 64 centers to estimate power capacity – which was close to the reported power capacity – and low and high water usage.
For the 10 more in progress, we had announced capacity for 11 of them, and then square footage for 17 of them (note – we had square footage for one data center that we did not have power capacity for). We then used the square footage from the 17 centers to estimate power capacity, and low and high water usage.
Using the Georgia Power estimate of 1 MW for 450 homes.
6500 MW could then power 2.9 M homes.
12,700 MW could then power 5.7 M homes.
Water estimates vary.
It is anywhere between 2 Gallons per Watt to 4.15 G per W.
Data centers are not required to track their water usage, and many still water an “inexpensive commodity.” In 2021, a survey of over 500 global data centers found that 49% did not track water use, with 63% stating there was “no business justification for collecting water usage data.”
Using the estimated 6500 MW of data centers and the 2 to 4.15 Gallons per Watt – we can estimate 13 Billion to 27 Billion Gallons of water per year.
For comparison, the average personal water withdrawal is 132 gallons per day.
In the US, where the average per capita water withdrawal is 48 billions gallons per year.
Thus, data centers in Georgia will be the equivalent of about 270K – 560K people. For comparison, Athens-Clarke is 129K people and the Savannah Metro area is 404K people
If we go with in-use and planned, 12,700 MW – we get about 25 B to 50 Billion gallons / year.
There is minimal reporting required for data centers in Georgia.
Many data centers deals are protected by non-disclosure agreements.
“Fewer than half of data center owners and operators are tracking the metrics needed to assess their sustainability and, in some cases, to meet pending regulatory requirements.” – Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey 2024 | Uptime Intelligence
- Total Power Capacity, Announced
- This information is usually provided publicly by data centers. See the pop-ups on the map to learn more.
- Power Capacity, Estimated
- Power Capacity can also be estimated from square footage of a center. It ranges from 150W to 300 W per square foot. Here we estimated power capacity by using: Total Square footage x 150 W / Sq foot
- Water Estimate, Low
- Water use estimates vary, but one source suggested that for every 100 MW of capacity, a center uses about 200 M Gallons of water per year.
Using this ratio, the low estimate of water (in million gallons per year) can be found via:
Power usage (MW) x 2 M Gal / yr (per MW)
- Water use estimates vary, but one source suggested that for every 100 MW of capacity, a center uses about 200 M Gallons of water per year.
- Water Estimate, High
SB 34 ensures that data centers, and only data centers, pay the billions of dollars of costs they cause.
Georgia Power customers have seen their bills go up, on average $43 a month, since Jan 2023.Mainly due to data center demand, GP has requested billions of dollars of additional energy grid upgrades. These have not yet been passed onto customers.
The Georgia Public Service (PSC) commission has passed new rules that say Georgia Power may pass these costs onto Data Centers. Former PSC member, Bobby Baker, said the new rules the PSC approved are full of loopholes that give Georgia Power so much flexibility over compliance that they offer no guaranteed protections for residential ratepayers. “[PSC] rules changes are essentially worthless… The cost causers need to pay for the costs they cause.”
“As the United States rapidly builds massive data centers for the development of artificial intelligence, many Americans are concerned about the environmental impact.” – Americans worry AI data centers harm environment | AP News | 23 Oct, 2025
