Are Data Centers Overstressing Our Infrastructure?
Data centers are reshaping our infrastructure—explore their environmental impacts and zoning challenges in our latest blog!
The servers never sleep. Behind every cloud backup, every streamed video, and every AI query processed in milliseconds, there's a physical building drawing enormous amounts of power and water — usually in someone's backyard. As hyperscalers race to meet insatiable digital demand, the communities hosting these facilities are starting to push back. Hard.
The tension isn't abstract. It shows up in rising electricity bills, strained aquifers, and township zoning boards suddenly being asked to rule on facilities that consume more power than small cities. North Whitehall Township in Pennsylvania is one of the latest communities to find itself at the center of this collision — and what's happening there reflects a much broader reckoning playing out across rural and suburban America.
Understanding Data Centers and Their Growth
Data centers are, at their core, industrial facilities. They house thousands of servers, networking equipment, and cooling systems running continuously. What's changed in the last decade isn't the concept — it's the scale.
The drivers are well-documented: cloud computing, streaming media, remote work infrastructure, and increasingly, the computational demands of artificial intelligence. Training a single large AI model can consume as much electricity as hundreds of homes use in a year. Multiply that across dozens of hyperscale facilities being built simultaneously, and the aggregate infrastructure stress becomes significant.
The industry's growth isn't slowing — it's accelerating. Global data center power consumption is projected to grow substantially through the rest of the decade, with the U.S. accounting for a disproportionate share. That growth has to land somewhere. It lands in communities that often have no idea what they're agreeing to until construction is already underway.
Developers are drawn to specific geography: access to fiber corridors, proximity to major metros without paying urban land prices, cheap power, and favorable local tax arrangements. Suburban and semi-rural townships check these boxes — which is exactly how places like North Whitehall end up on site selection shortlists.
The Hidden Costs Billed to Everyone Else
Electricity consumption is the most visible pressure point. A single hyperscale data center can draw anywhere from 100 to over 500 megawatts of power at full load. To put that in perspective, 100 MW is enough to power roughly 80,000 average American homes. When that demand hits a regional grid that wasn't designed to absorb it, the consequences aren't limited to the facility itself.
Utilities often recover the cost of grid upgrades — new substations, transmission lines, transformer capacity — through rate increases spread across all ratepayers in the service territory. That means the family in the next township over, who has no data center nearby and receives no economic benefit from the facility, may still see their electricity bill rise to subsidize the infrastructure expansion it required. This cost-shifting is one of the least-discussed but most consequential aspects of the data center boom.
Water is the other pressure point — and in some ways the more alarming one. Most large data centers use evaporative cooling, which consumes millions of gallons of water annually. A mid-sized facility might draw 1 to 5 million gallons per day during peak cooling demand. In regions already experiencing drought stress or aging municipal water systems, that's not a rounding error. It's a material strain on shared resources that communities depend on for drinking water, agriculture, and ecological function.
The data center doesn't experience the shortage it helps create. The neighboring farm does. The downstream watershed does.
Zoning Regulations Weren't Built for This
Most township zoning codes were written long before anyone imagined facilities of this scale arriving in light industrial or mixed-use zones. The result is a regulatory mismatch that leaves local governments poorly equipped to evaluate, condition, or refuse proposals they don't fully understand.
Zoning regulations typically define land uses in broad categories — manufacturing, commercial, utility — without accounting for the specific operational characteristics of a modern data center: continuous heavy electrical load, water withdrawal volumes, noise from cooling equipment, traffic from diesel fuel deliveries for backup generators, and the cumulative impact of multiple facilities clustering in the same corridor.
When a 40-megawatt data center arrives, it's often classified under a code category that was written for a warehouse or light industrial park. That classification shapes everything from permitted uses to the conditions a township can legally impose. By the time local officials realize the facility they approved bears no operational resemblance to what they envisioned, construction is done and the servers are running.
This isn't a failure of local governance — it's a structural gap. State legislatures and planning agencies have been slow to develop model ordinances that give townships the tools to assess data center proposals on their actual merits and impacts. A few states are starting to move on this, but most municipalities are still improvising.
North Whitehall Township: A Community at a Crossroads
North Whitehall Township in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, became a focal point for exactly these tensions. The township found itself navigating the intersection of data center development pressure, environmental concerns, and the limits of existing zoning authority — a combination that's becoming increasingly familiar to planning boards across the Mid-Atlantic and beyond.
What makes the North Whitehall situation instructive isn't that it's unusual. It's that it's typical. A community with existing character and infrastructure commitments suddenly confronting a land use that operates at an entirely different scale. Residents raising concerns about electricity costs, water availability, and noise. Local officials working within ordinance frameworks that weren't designed for this moment.
The community's response illustrates something important: opposition to data centers isn't simply NIMBYism. When residents raise questions about water shortages, sound impacts, and rate increases, they're identifying real externalities that the project economics don't internalize. Those costs get distributed across the community whether or not the community consented to bear them.
The lessons from North Whitehall apply broadly. Townships that want to manage data center development — rather than be managed by it — need updated ordinances that address noise thresholds, water withdrawal limits, grid interconnection cost responsibility, and cumulative impact assessment when multiple facilities are proposed in the same area. Waiting until a specific project arrives to develop that framework is already too late.
Building Infrastructure That Can Actually Support the Load
The data center industry isn't going away, and the demand driving it is real. The question isn't whether to accommodate this infrastructure — it's how to do it without offloading the costs onto communities that lack the leverage to negotiate equitably.
Several approaches are gaining traction among developers and regulators who are thinking seriously about this problem. Direct power purchase agreements that hold facilities responsible for the transmission infrastructure their load requires — rather than socializing those costs across all ratepayers — are one mechanism. Water recycling and closed-loop cooling systems that dramatically reduce freshwater consumption are technically mature and deployable, though they cost more than evaporative cooling and aren't universally required.
On the planning side, some jurisdictions are developing data center overlay zones — specific regulatory frameworks that apply when a project meets certain capacity thresholds. These overlays can require environmental impact assessments, set binding conditions on water use and noise, and establish community benefit agreements as a condition of approval. It's a more sophisticated approach than trying to shoehorn a 300 MW facility into a light industrial classification.
The most sustainable path forward combines honest accounting of infrastructure costs, updated zoning frameworks that reflect what these facilities actually are, and technology choices that reduce environmental impact from the outset — not as an afterthought. Developers who recognize that community acceptance is itself a form of infrastructure — fragile, essential, and worth investing in — will find fewer North Whitehall-style confrontations in their project timelines.
The communities that navigate this best will be the ones that get ahead of the demand curve: developing clear standards before the site selectors arrive, rather than reacting to proposals shaped entirely by someone else's priorities. For township officials, regional planners, and state legislators still treating data centers as just another industrial land use, the clock is running.
The servers already are.
Call to Action
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