Other countries fought data centers first, and the US can learn from them

Data centers are now a US election issue, but other places ran into the same problems years earlier. Paris Marx, author of the book Hyperscale, says the US story looks familiar. In an interview with Wired, he said he had already seen it play out elsewhere, though he called the scale and speed in the US staggering.

Ireland saw it first

Dublin passed a data center moratorium in 2021. The grid operator said there were too many data centers and no capacity left to connect more. The industry did not stop. Companies looked at building elsewhere in Ireland, tapped the gas network to run generators, and later built dedicated gas power plants.

Irish data center firms also lobbied for a law that lets private companies build electricity cables. Ireland's grid is public, and only the public utility could build lines before. Marx says that raises questions about fairness. Ireland's environmental agency warned that climate targets would be harder to meet.

The water secret in Oregon

In The Dalles, Oregon, Google tried to hide how much water it used. The city council helped keep the figures secret for the better part of a year. When the community finally got the numbers, it learned Google was using 29 percent of the town's water.

What could go wrong

Marx believes the AI industry is in a bubble. He points to delays getting turbines and chips. He also notes that chips used for AI may need replacing within a few years, so a data center could lose its value before demand returns.

After the dotcom bust, many data center companies went under. Equinix survived and bought up a lot of them. Marx says that if the AI boom fades, the gas plants built for data centers would still exist and would look for new customers.

A different model

Marx closes his book with New Zealand. There, a community-led effort built a more accurate speech-recognition model for the Māori language. Local cloud providers host the data. He sees it as a non-extractive way to use AI.

He wants governments to set firmer rules on data center development. He also wants rules on the AI products themselves, since he says many promises about generative AI have not been met.

What it means locally

• Ask early how much power and water a proposed data center will use.
• Ask whether the company plans its own gas power plant.
• Ask whether the usage figures will be made public.