Are data centers bad for the environment? – Deseret News
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SciencePoliticsUtah<br>Fear of data centers outpaces knowledge about them<br>Do data centers hurt the environment?<br>Published: June 21, 2026, 9:00 p.m. MDT
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Eliza Anderson, Deseret News
By Eva Terry<br>Eva Terry is a staff writer with the Politics and the West team, covering energy and the environment.
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Utah residents have raised concerns that the proposed Stratos data center in Box Elder County could increase water use, electricity costs, emissions and heat in the region.<br>Estimates about data centers' water use vary widely, and researchers say older claims that each AI prompt consumes a bottle of water are not accurate.<br>Data center water use depends heavily on design, location and cooling methods, with some facilities using far more water than others.<br>Data centers generally have not caused increases in residential electricity rates, with other factors like fuel prices and state policies playing larger roles.
Last week in Springville, Utah, a group of young moms sat in Memorial Park, watching their toddlers play. In the high-70-degree weather, atop the park’s green grass, the conversation turned to data centers.<br>One mom had mused how she was going to keep her new infant cool this summer, and Matty Shmitz responded with worry that the approved data center in Box Elder County was going to make the summer’s heat worse.<br>In a later conversation with the Deseret News, Shmitz described the data center as a “constant numb pain in the back of my brain.”<br>Through TikTok, Instagram and news reports, Shmitz said she has developed serious concerns about the data center.<br>Will it use an inordinate amount of water? Where will that water come from? Will it drive up the cost of electricity and increase the temperature? And at the root of it, why are we risking Utah’s beautiful land to fuel artificial intelligence, when it seems like artificial intelligence will hurt American society?<br>The Stratos Project is one of more than 1,800 U.S.-based data centers in various stages of development. Once built, it will join more than 3,100 data centers already in operation across the United States, the earliest of which were built in the 1990s.<br>Backed by “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary, the project as planned is massive compared to other data centers in the U.S. At full buildout, it will have a power capacity of 9 gigawatts — roughly 90 to 225 times larger than the average data center, which uses 40 to 100 megawatts.<br>These existing data centers power the digital infrastructure behind the internet.<br>If you store images in the cloud, buy anything with a debit card, ask Siri a question, stream a show on Netflix, or load directions on Google Maps, you’re using a data center.<br>But data centers’ everyday utility has been lost in a haze of anxiety about new proposals. Shmitz is not alone in her concerns. More than half of Utah’s residents say they oppose the data center in Box Elder County, according to a Deseret News-Hinckley Institute poll conducted mid-May.<br>So it makes sense to ask: Are concerns about data centers well-founded?<br>Related<br>Separating fact from fiction on the massive Utah data center project
The water consumption confusion<br>In 2024, The Washington Post released a report claiming that a 100-word email written by ChatGPT consumes an entire bottle of water or 519 milliliters.<br>The article proceeded to scale up that number: one ChatGPT-generated email a week for a year consumes 27 liters of water; one ChatGPT-generated email a week for a year from 10% of the U.S. population (16 million people) requires more than 435 million liters — “equal to the water consumed by all Rhode Island households for 1.5 days.”<br>Readers were then left to fill in the blanks about usage. In 2025, ChatGPT was queried about 2.5 billion times a day.<br>Based on the Post’s measurements, 2.5 billion queries (if they were all the size of an email) would require nearly 343 million gallons of water — more than 520 Olympic-sized swimming pools — a day.<br>When Andy Masley, a former physics teacher turned writer, saw this report, it didn’t sit well with him. So he started looking into the article’s methodology, then reached out to the researcher tapped for the calculation, Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California,...