Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Oracle – plus the Blackstone Group, which calls itself the largest investor in AI infrastructure in the world – pitch new jobs and tax revenue to communities that instead end up getting higher electric bills, drained water, lost farmland, and a grating mechanical hum. And last summer, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to fast-track permitting, pushing agencies to ease the very rules built to protect them.
Here are seven things to know about who pays for the data-center buildout – and who’s profiting:
1. They can eat more power than an entire state.
In May, officials in Box Elder County, Utah, cleared the way for the Stratos Project, an AI complex that could eventually draw up to 9 gigawatts of power, which is more than double the roughly 4 gigawatts the entire state of Utah uses in total on average. Box Elder Residents filed three separate referendum petitionsto stop it. All three were denied. Outside of Utah, in Wisconsin, there are now two planned projects that would need about 3.9 gigawatts, which is enough to power 4.3 million homes, set inside a state with only 2.8 million housing units in total.
2. You’re paying for them on your electric bill.
As data centers expand and cluster, they continue to need more energy from their neighboring electrical grid to meet demand, and utility companies have a habit of spreading the increased rate across everyone’s bill. Residential electricity rates rose about 32% nationally from 2020 to 2025, and the buildout of data centers is a growing driver. PJM’s independent market monitor, the watchdog for the grid serving much of the eastern U.S., has named hyperscale data centers the primary driver of soaring regional capacity costs. A few states have started making data centers pay for the energy strain they cause – the obvious fix, which even some in the industry now claim to back. Most haven’t. So the bill for powering someone else’s AI ambitions quietly lands in your mailbox – and good luck finding the line item that explains why.
3. They drink your water – and won’t stop humming
Nationally, it’s true that data centers use far less water than farms or golf courses. A data center evaporates 70-90% of what it withdraws, versus the 5-15% a typical household consumes, and where farms and golf courses spread their thirst across wide acreage and shifting seasons, a data center sinks a single, constant, often-unpredictable and spiky straw into one town’s system, so the local hit can be staggering. One Meta facility in Newton County, Georgia, uses about 10% of the entire county’s water.
There’s also the noise from the center’s cooling fans and generators that release a relentless low-frequency hum that researchers have linked to sleep loss, chronic stress, and higher blood pressure, to a point that residents in Michiganand New Jersey have begun filing suit.
4. You’re subsidizing them.
On top of the bills and the water, taxpayers are often footing the cost for the incentives used to lure these projects in. At least 38 states offer some form of sales-tax break to data centers, pitched as economic development. In Ohio, those exemptions cost the state nearly $1.6 billion in 2025, against an official projection of only $136 million. Within days of those figures surfacing, Republican Governor Mike DeWine unexpectedly paused the breaks while a state committee studies whether these data centers are worth it.
5. They run on dirty power – and you breathe it.
To get online fast, many data centers don’t wait to be connected to their local grid. Instead, some are burning fossil fuels on-site, with diesel generators and gas turbines. Harvard researchers found that a single gas-and-diesel-powered facility in Loudoun County, Virginia, could cause 3.4 to 6.5 premature deaths a year and up to $99 million in annual health damage.
Nationally, one study projects the data-center buildout could cause as many as 1,300 premature deaths a year by 2030 – with a total public health burden expected to double that of the U.S. steel industry and rival deaths caused by every car, bus, and truck in California. The most brazen case south of Memphis, Elon Musk’s xAI ran dozens of gas turbines without air permits to power its Colossus data center. The NAACP sued under the Clean Air Act — and the Trump Justice Department signaled it might intervene on xAI’s side.
6. They’re taking the land – and often in secret.
The buildout of these centers needs land as much as they need power, and these companies are increasingly taking it from farmers. Across the rural Midwest and South, data centers are converting prime farmland that, once paved, rarely returns to agriculture, while bidding up land far beyond what crops could ever justify – which prices out the people farming it. Wiring it all up means running high-voltage lines through private property: Georgia Power’s $16 billion grid expansion threatens hundreds of properties, with some homes facing demolition and eminent domain hanging over the holdouts. And communities often can’t see it coming – in Virginia, a review found 80% of localities with data centers had signed non-disclosure agreements, with developers using shell companies to mask who’s buying up the neighborhood. Outside Virginia, the same playbook of NDAs and anonymous shell companies has surfaced in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania.
7. Of course, the Trump family has a stake.
The Trump administration has made its loyalties clear in favor of these companies and not the 7 in 10 Americans who don’t want these data centers anywhere near their homes. These builds reward the tech billionaires who bankrolled Donald Trump’s return, but the president also has a direct financial stake in the fight for nationwide data center expansion.
Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social, in which Donald Trump holds a roughly 41% stake, announced a $6 billion merger with a fusion-power firm to power the chips in the data centers that the AI boom runs on. That merger was also unveiled the same day regulators let data centers plug directly into power plants. A former White House ethics lawyer called it a serious conflict of interest. In addition to their father, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump invested in an AI data center startup of their own, weeks after the president pledged hundreds of billions to expand AI infrastructure while loosening regulations on the industry.
Zeteo’s Andrew McDonald and Kennedy Garmong contributed to this piece.
