Artificial intelligence has become the hottest race in technology, and companies are spending billions to stay ahead.
That race is fueling a construction boom unlike anything the tech industry has seen before. Across the Panhandle and Texas, massive AI data centers are popping up on hundreds of acres of land, promising jobs, investment and economic growth.
But for the people living nearby, the story isn't always so positive.
In some communities, families have found themselves fighting to keep their homes as utilities expand power lines. Others worry about shrinking water supplies or deal with the constant hum of industrial cooling equipment that never shuts off. Lawsuits are piling up, local officials are facing angry residents, and questions are growing about whether communities are paying too high a price for the AI revolution.
The technology powering ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot and countless other AI tools may seem invisible, but the buildings behind them are anything but.
What exactly is an AI data center?
Think of a data center as the engine room of the internet.
They're giant warehouses packed wall-to-wall with computers, servers and networking equipment that process and store information every second of every day. Every time you stream Netflix, scroll Facebook, pay a bill online or ask an AI chatbot a question, that request travels through one or more data centers.
Without them, the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.
Some data centers simply store information in the cloud. Others belong to banks, hospitals or government agencies. The biggest facilities, though, are called hyperscale data centers. They're owned or operated by tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, and they're the ones driving today's building boom because they handle enormous amounts of AI computing.
AI is making them bigger than ever
Data centers have been around for decades, but artificial intelligence has changed the game.
Training AI models takes incredible computing power. Every new chatbot, image generator and AI assistant requires thousands of powerful computer chips working around the clock.
"Demand for data centers and processing has just exploded exponentially because of AI," Kim Rueben, a former senior fiscal systems advisor at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, said.
The growth has been staggering.
According to the Lincoln Institute, the number of data centers in the United States more than doubled between 2018 and 2021. By late 2025, that number had doubled again.
There are now at least 4,000 data centers nationwide, and more are on the way.
States are competing to attract them, too. Right now, 38 states offer tax breaks or other incentives to lure companies looking to build new facilities.
For local leaders, landing one of these projects can mean millions of dollars in investment.
For nearby neighborhoods, however, it can also mean living next to what amounts to an industrial complex.
They use an incredible amount of electricity
The biggest concern may be power.
A regular cloud data center already uses as much electricity as 10,000 to 25,000 homes in a year, according to the International Energy Agency.
Hyperscale AI facilities can use even more—as much electricity as more than 100,000 households.
One project under construction in Cheyenne, Wyoming, is expected to consume more electricity each year than every home in the entire state combined.
Nationwide, data centers used 176 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2023, according to a congressional report. That's about the same amount of electricity Ireland uses in a year.
And demand isn't slowing down.
A Berkeley Lab report projects that electricity use from data centers could double—or even triple—by 2028.
"AI, particularly large language models, requires enormous computational resources," Mahmut Kandemir, a professor in Pennsylvania State University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, said. "Training these models involves thousands of graphics processing units running continuously for months, leading to high electricity consumption. By 2030–2035, data centers could account for 20% of global electricity use, putting an immense strain on power grids."
Meeting that demand doesn't just mean generating more electricity.
It also means building more substations, more transmission lines and, in many places, more power plants.
"Each one of those buildings is using as much as a city's worth of power, so that power infrastructure is having a huge impact on our communities," Julie Bolthouse, director of land policy at Piedmont Environmental Council, told the Lincoln Institute. "All the transmission lines that have to be built, the eminent domain used to get the land for those transmission lines, all of the energy infrastructure, gas plants, pipelines that deliver the gas, the air pollution associated with that, the climate impacts of all of that."
For some property owners, those new transmission lines have become as controversial as the data centers themselves.
AI has a huge thirst for water
Keeping thousands of computers running nonstop creates a lot of heat.
That's why many data centers use enormous cooling systems that consume millions of gallons of freshwater every day.
The Environmental and Energy Study Institute estimates that a single hyperscale facility can use up to 5 million gallons daily. That's about as much water as a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people would use.
Over the course of a year, one facility can consume more than 1.8 billion gallons of water.
Multiply that by the estimated 500 to 600 hyperscale data centers in the United States, and the numbers become staggering.
Even facilities that recycle water aren't necessarily solving the problem.
"Even if they're using reclaimed or recycled water, that water is no longer going back into the base flow of the rivers and streams," Bolthouse said. "That has ecological impacts as well as supply issues. Everybody is upstream from someone else."
In drought-prone states, that has become one of the biggest sticking points whenever a new data center is proposed.
Then there's the noise
Most people picture data centers as quiet buildings filled with computers.
They're often anything but.
The giant fans, cooling equipment and backup generators operate around the clock.
According to industrial communications company Sensear, some facilities produce more than 90 decibels of sound.
Health experts generally consider prolonged exposure above 85 decibels enough to damage hearing. Even lower levels of constant noise have been linked to higher stress and elevated blood pressure.
Depending on weather conditions and the surrounding landscape, the low mechanical hum can travel hundreds of feet—or even a mile.
Some residents have also complained about infrasound, extremely low-frequency vibrations that can't always be heard but can sometimes be felt.
As more facilities are built, more Americans are living close enough to notice.
A Pew Research Center analysis found that nearly 40% of U.S. homes are within five miles of at least one operating data center.
This summer, residents in three different cities filed lawsuits over noise coming from nearby data centers.
The debate isn't going away
There's little doubt that AI is here to stay.
The technology is becoming part of daily life, and companies are investing billions to expand the computing power needed to keep it running.
The debate is no longer about whether more data centers will be built.
It's about where they'll be built, who benefits and who bears the cost.
For some communities, the projects represent jobs and economic development.
For others, they bring concerns over water use, electricity demand, industrial noise and changing landscapes.
