China, Iran, North Korea and ISIS won’t pause their AI race. The US would be crazy to do so.

China, Iran, North Korea and ISIS won’t pause their AI race. The US would be crazy to do so.

A recent Friends of the Earth email wailed that Urgent Action is needed to prevent massive data centers from destroying communities, the environment and property values, while tech billionaires get even richer!

Other opponents say artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers (DCs) gobble up rivers of water and terawatts of electricity, sprawl across landscapes, raise electricity prices, and help Big Brother spy on us. Similar assertions echo across the political spectrum and country.

It’s impossible to address all these complex issues in one article, but here’s a start.

First, how big data centers are and what their workloads and demands are depends on what they do. Older, conventional DCs manage purchases and other business applications. Streaming services handle vastly more data per second, especially during evenings and weekends.

Search engines need power to “crawl” through web pages and other sources to build indexes and answer questions at breakneck speed. AI requests require infinitely more computer power (for training, inferences, analyses, predictions and summaries) – and thus still more computers, electricity and cooling systems: hyperscales, hyperspeeds, hyper resource demands.

We must address these needs and solve the conflicts because we increasingly need AI and DCs.  

A data center is simply a building or warehouse filled with computers that generate heat as they meet countless growing needs across nearly every segment of modern society. That heat must dissipate somewhere, to prevent those computers from overheating, crashing or even catching fire.

Older DCs used constant flowing water and cooling towers or evaporative systems – as did their coal, gas or nuclear electricity sources. The U.S. produced more natural gas in 2025 than Russia and Iran combined. Modern AI and other computer chips are cooled by water and chemical liquids running in........

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