The Danger of Data Centers in Delaware
Connor Lee ‘29
Staff Writer
As AI use becomes a mainstay in society, data centers to support the platforms have popped up across the country. Yet, many people do not understand the scale of the damage they cause. In Delaware, data centers for DaSTOR, Data Canopy, and Project Washington have opened and are already impacting life in the community.
These data centers require massive amounts of electricity to run, which Delaware infrastructure is unable to support. One recent proposal from Project Washington planned to use 1.2 gigawatts of power, creating a large tax on the state’s electricity grid. Data centers like this would take over 1000 times the energy of a single family home. According to the NPR, data centers in Delaware are likely to drive up electricity prices for families and create large amounts of noise pollution from the heavy machinery used in cooling systems.
Along with the power usage, data centers are already notorious for using obscene amounts of water. Data centers across the country have been seen to pollute the local water supply, while driving up the bill for consumers. The massive amounts of water used to cool the systems have led to an era of water bankruptcy which has the potential to threaten the availability of clean water within the next few decades.
Adding onto the economic factors even more, datacenters are expensive. They cost billions and create less than 50 new jobs in the community for private security and custodial services. One anonymous staff member at Delaware’s department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control stated “apart from the energy consumption the damage done in the loss of land is just as bad” and “the end does not and will not justify the means these companies are going to get there.” Providing big tech companies safe heavens to construct these buildings will ultimately lead to less jobs in the long run while driving out people who have lived in the surrounding area because they may not be able to afford the higher cost of living.
Outside of Delaware, many states are already noticing larger effects of living with data centers, especially when politicians incentivize the opening of more data centers. States like Mississippi are offering tech companies ten-year tax breaks in exchange for opening these data centers. Some believe that the politicians making these decisions do not share the beliefs of the public regarding these data centers. Cape student, Derek Hernandez, agreed with this sentiment, mentioning “I think our politicians are getting old and some things like AI are hard for them to understand.”
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