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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Environment
Oliver Milman

What the datacenter boom means for America’s environment – and electricity bills

A Google data center in Iowa.
A Google data center in Iowa. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

The headlong rush to build huge new datacenters, in order to support the growth of AI, is raising a number of concerns in the US – around the impact upon the climate crisis, water use and electricity bills. It’s also set to reshape American politics in potentially unusual ways.

Companies such as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters that will form the backbone to the surging use of AI by businesses and the public.

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