By: Dominic Jacobs/Staff Writer
Data centers have been increasingly common amongst many communities within the United States of America. Even so, there is a much more noticeable concentration of these facilities.
Having a total amount reaching over 200, Ohio is ranked as the fifth-highest state in the country with operational data centers, according to ooc.ohio.gov.
A data center is a large building housing a multitude of computer servers and other related equipment. These computers constantly store, move and process large amounts of data that provide substantial support to everyday services used such as cloud storage, streaming services, apps and websites.
More recently, data centers have changed their focus to become more oriented towards Artificial Intelligence. While providing the processing power, a single data center can also take away resources, being energy and water intensive.
Usually before a center can operate, major investments may be required for new infrastructure. Such upgrades are applied to electric transmission lines and substations in order to handle their large demand for electricity.
According to occ.ohio.gov, large data centers can reach a rate of energy consumption equivalent to around 100,000 homes. In 2023, data centers nationwide used approximately 176 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity, which is roughly 4% of all electricity used that year within the United States. One hundred seventy-six terawatt-hours is equivalent to the total usage of electricity used by the state of Ohio in its entirety in 2023, while the consumption of electricity from data centers alone is expected to reach around nine percent by 2030.
One reasoning as to why Ohio is such a hotspot for these centers is due to Central Ohio, where the land availability, transmission access and proximity to consumers makes it much more appealing for development. According to occ.ohio.gov, multiple companies also plan to invest up to $40 billion more in Ohio data centers by 2030. Construction of these data centers does indeed create short-term jobs. Centers usually create a relatively low amount of permanent jobs once they are completely built.
Incremental growth of these centers are driving higher electricity demands nationwide, putting pressure on the prices of residential consumers upwards. In June 2025, many consumers in Ohio alone witnessed electric supply price increases of 10% to even 35%. Connecting data centers to grids can also lead to shared costs among many consumers in regards to improving the grid’s capacity.
While the total usage of water for cooling data centers only makes up a small fraction of the overall national water withdrawals, these facilities can cause intense stress on municipal water supplies. Using these municipal supplies, treated drinking water is utilized for maintaining overall temperatures of equipment. Large data centers can consume one to five million gallons of our fresh water per day while under peak or hot conditions, or as much as a small city of 30,000 to 50,000 residents.
Data centers can also affect the health of the public throughout their lifecycle, as around 56% of their current energy sources are from natural gas and coal. The air pollution from these power plants being kept open and constructed as a result from these centers costs each American resident an average of $2,500 a year, which totals to $820 billion annually. The exposure caused from harmful pollutants and the contamination of drinking water leads to more than 107,000 premature deaths annually as well.
While Ohio and the United States benefit from the digital infrastructure and economic investments by the creation of these data centers, these facilities present clear challenges to a multitude of resources. Balancing these intense resource requirements and ever rising utility costs for local consumers will always remain a hurdle for many communities. Moving forward, both policymakers and the technology industry must enact more collaboration to mitigate the severe strains put on our communities, resources, and people.
