Data centers have become an important local issue, but they’ve actually been around almost since the 1940s. Not all data centers are alike, however, and it’s important to distinguish the differences.

Traditional data centers are generally housed in office parks, where they blend in with surrounding offices. These hold the servers and storage that support our everyday life: web sites, shopping, banking and investing, as well as “cloud storage” that holds your photos and backups. They are owned by individual companies supporting only their own services, as well as by large providers who rent service to smaller users. For example, this website is hosted at one such data center.

These centers are not controversial, as their use of electricity and water is similar to typical office buildings, and any noise (minimal except when running on emergency power) is generally away from residential areas.

So-called “artifical intelligence” (AI) data centers are different. They contain thousands of high-powered computers that require a great deal of electricity and produce huge amounts of heat, which can require massive quantities of water to cool. Occupying as much as several square miles of space, they are often powered with noisy and polluting gas turbine generators, and have attracted strong opposition all around the nation.