Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
—“A Day in the Life” by The Beatles
Ah, those were simpler days. When John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote that in 1967, there were no such things as data centers. Today, though, the protagonist of that song might have already used a data center twice — once if he or she relied on an alarm connected to the internet to wake up by and a second time if he or she had checked the time on a Wi-Fi clock.
Maybe even more. Did the singer happen to order the coffee or tea in that cup from a grocery store delivery service? If so, that order went through a data center. Is that coffeemaker, by chance, plugged into the “internet of things”? Is the thermostat for the residence connected to the internet? If so, more data centers.
Over the past year, data centers have become politically despised by both left and right, according to recent polling (including the Commonwealth Poll from Virginia Commonwealth University). At the same time, we’ve increased the number of things we do that require data centers. This is a form of cognitive dissonance — where we say we want all the conveniences of modern life but don’t want the facilities that make those conveniences possible.
On the one hand, this is no different than how people feel about energy generation. Everybody wants the lights to come on, but nobody wants a power plant (or, these days, a solar farm) nearby. On the other hand, we all understand that we do turn on the lights, but we may not recognize all the times we tap into data centers.
Our current frenzy over data centers led me to wonder: What is our data center footprint? We’re all familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint — how much carbon we’re all responsible for pumping into the atmosphere. What’s the data center equivalent? To what extent are each of us driving the demand for data centers?
Here’s what I found.
American life has changed to require data centers
— We’ve stopped writing checks, and we’ve stopped spending cash
When this century began, 67% of us were paying bills by check, or occasionally by cash, according to The Financial Brand. Now that figure appears to be just 10% or so, according to the Federal Reserve.
Some of us never carry cash anymore. We swipe a plastic card. That means almost all of our bill-paying nowadays is digital — and each transaction may involve at least six different data centers, according to Bluefin. It starts on your computer or phone, goes to the store, then to a payment processor, a bank, then back to the store, with some additional “payment processors” along the way.
— Almost one-fifth of our shopping is now online
Once, shopping required going to a store. Now 17.1% of all sales take place online, according to the Federal Reserve. Many of us have ordered online and tracked the shipment. (Why is it going through Terre Haute a second time?) What if we could track that order as it pings among data centers? A single order may bounce among a half dozen or more different data centers, from your local internet provider to the company you’re buying from to the payment processor to a fraud alert service to your bank to the delivery companies along the way. Each of those might involve multiple data centers, as the data is shuffled around.
— Almost half of our entertainment is now online. Probably more.
Once upon a time, we had three channels and not even all of those came in clearly. I grew up learning how to “jiggle the antenna” if the reception wasn’t clear. Now, Nielsen tells us that 48.6% of our television time is devoted to streaming services. Cable services have fallen to 20.5%, over-the-air broadcasts to 19.2%. That other 11.8% or so may also involve data centers because some of that is devoted to gaming. Every time we stream “House of the Dragon,” we’re really streaming “House of the Data Center.” And those multiplayer online games? Data centers.
How many data centers are involved in all these activities? That’s hard to tell. Many entertainment companies don’t disclose this data. Netflix says only that it has 18,000 servers spread across 6,000 locations around the world, but there could be multiple servers in a single data center. Hulu doesn’t have its own data centers but contracts through Amazon Web Services, which has at least 914 data centers around the world. Of those, 96 are in Virginia, almost entirely in Northern Virginia, although there’s one in Louisa County.
For some, social media is entertainment. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, now has 165 data centers, with seven of those in Virginia, according to the Data Center Map. It’s unclear how many TikTok has; the company rents storage space, and some of those facilities are in Virginia, according to Forbes.
One way or another, the amount of data being generated each year has doubled since 2020 and is projected to keep growing. Exploding Topics says 90% of the data in the world has been generated in the past two years. All of that has to be stored somewhere. Data centers are being built to keep up with this geometrically increasing amount of data. JLL, a global commercial real estate company that tracks data centers, says that the vacancy rate in data centers is just 1% (and 0.6% in Northern Virginia) and that “data center vacancy is likely to remain zero through 2028.” Why that date? “Most tenants securing space today are contracting for 2028 deliveries,” JLL says. Will the amount of data level off after that? Doubtful, based on all these trends. We have set in motion a chain of events that appears to have no end in sight — and we haven’t even talked about artificial intelligence yet (although we will soon).
— Americans are online more than 10 hours a day
For the very first Earth Day in 1970, the cartoonist Walt Kelly had his character Pogo say: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The same admonition applies today.
The average American household now has 20 to 25 devices connected to the internet, according to AccessParks. That’s up from 10 to 15 just five years ago. “Smart TVs, streaming devices, gaming consoles, smart speakers and video doorbells all maintain persistent connections,” AccessParks says. “Smart thermostats, light bulbs, door locks, security cameras and appliances including refrigerators and washing machines increasingly connect automatically. Wearable devices, home automation hubs, Wi-Fi extenders and smart plugs all add to your device count.” If you have a teenager in your home, the number may be higher. “Families with teenagers often [exceed] 30 connected devices,” the site says. (I must be a Luddite because I can only count seven in my house).
Whether for work or play or paying the bills, our lives are now digital ones. Statista says Americans average six hours and 40 minutes a day online. Those were 2024 stats. A survey last year by the telecom company Optimum Communications found that Americans spend more than 10 hours a day online. Regardless of which number is right, we’re running all that data through a data center somewhere, somehow — actually multiple data centers, as we’ve seen from the example above.
A Norwegian data center company calculated two years ago that we use data centers about 40 times a day. “From checking social media to driving your car, making payments, ordering food, accessing your health records or simply sending an email — nearly every digital action relies on data centers,” Green Mountain AS said in a social media post.
That seems a lot, but now consider this: Americans use the internet more than Norwegians do. Our friends in Norway average four hours and 35 minutes a day online, according to Statista. We’re somewhere north of that. Even if we use the more conservative Statista figure and assume that Norwegian data centers work like ours do, that means we’re probably using about 58 data centers apiece every day. If the Optimum survey is right, we’re each making use of 87 data centers every day.
Whatever the precise number is, all that data center usage has a different impact in Norway than it does in the United States. That’s because Norway generates almost 89% of its electricity from hydroelectric power and about 99% from non-carbon sources of all types. The U.S. electric grid relies more on carbon-based sources of power. A Norwegian’s data center footprint creates virtually no carbon footprint. An American’s does.
Each of us isn’t using the full capacity of those data centers, of course, just a ping here or a ping there, but as Everett Dirksen once said about federal spending, all those add up. That’s why we’re now seeing data center proposals pop up throughout the western part of Virginia — they’re being pushed out of Northern Virginia and have to go somewhere. We may not want them here, just as we may not want energy plants, but they are simply the consequence of our own actions. Well, up to a point. “The increase wasn’t a conscious decision,” AccessParks says. “Manufacturers simply integrated connectivity into products you’d buy anyway. When you replace a thermostat, the new one is smart. When you buy a doorbell, it includes Wi-Fi.”
The site goes on to predict that “device counts will likely reach 30-40 per household by 2030. Products not typically connected today will integrate networking as manufacturing costs decrease.”
The same thing is true of artificial intelligence, which is now being incorporated into our daily lives in ways we sometimes can’t control.
We can’t blame everything on AI
— Most data centers aren’t about AI
A Goldman Sachs study last year found that about 15% of data centers are related to artificial intelligence, meaning 85% are general run-of-the-mill data centers. A study this year by the McKinsey Global Institute found that non-AI demand for data centers will grow by 1.7 times — nearly double — between now and 2030. The demand for data centers would be growing even if AI didn’t exist. But, of course, it does, and that just exacerbates things.
— Data centers would grow anyway, although AI is accelerating that growth
Goldman Sachs projects that AI use will grow by 3.5 times by 2030. By then, about 30% of data centers will be devoted to AI, the company foresees. Whether that’s “only” 30% depends on your viewpoint, but the point is that AI isn’t responsible for all the data center growth — we are, because we keep using the internet.
— AI is inescapable. It’s everywhere, whether we think we’re using it or not.
Here’s an example of how AI is unavoidable. You may hate it and vow never to use ChatGPT. Good for you. I hate the thing. I think it leads to lazy thinking. However, the online ecosystem is evolving to a point where we’re all using AI even if we don’t want to.
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association recently reported that both hospitals and insurance companies are using artificial intelligence to track bills and analyze them. Your doctor might treat you in person, but behind the scenes, the billing process is setting AI into motion.
If you have a credit card or a debit card, your financial institution is using AI to detect fraud. That time my credit card company called me to ask if I’d been buying tens of thousands of dollars of stereo equipment in Los Angeles? Nobody was sitting in a cubicle somewhere, thumbing through the receipts and musing, “Gosh, wonder why he’s in LA? Did he finally strike it rich and buy a mansion in Beverly Hills?” No, some computer program somewhere flagged a suspicious transaction.
If you order from Amazon (whether it’s tens of thousands of dollars of stereo equipment or some cheap trinket), you’re setting AI into motion somewhere along the supply chain, whether you want to or not. You may think that driver knows how to find you, but Amazon isn’t so sure. Its website proclaims that once a package hits the local distribution center, “Amazon then uses more than twenty machine learning models to understand the best delivery routes for drivers. If a certain road is closed or a route is experiencing more traffic than another, AI recalculates the ideal path for safety, speed, and reliability. Those algorithms are running right up until a package is loaded onto a van, continuously finding the fastest, most efficient route for drivers and customers alike.”
When Amazon says “those algorithms are running right up until a package is loaded,” what it means is that somewhere a data center is running. Or maybe lots of them. That’s the part we have no control over. I just want my package delivered — on time. I didn’t ask for Amazon to use AI, but it is. This is why Amazon has 112 data centers, according to Data Center Map, with 39 more under construction and 79 others planned. Of those, 98 are in Virginia. That’s also why Amazon has at least 19 solar energy sites across Virginia — and why it’s partnered with Dominion Energy to explore adding a small nuclear reactor to Dominion’s North Anna nuclear power station in Louisa County. (Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy. You can become a donor yourself and test that proposition.)
Note that if you’re paying online, somewhere along the line your credit card company and your bank are going to use data centers to process that payment. Even if you send us an old-fashioned check, you can’t escape AI. The U.S. Postal Service is now using AI for its operations. Even if you wanted to call someone from the Cardinal News development staff and arrange to meet us somewhere to hand over a bag of cash, the phone call or the email involved in setting up that transaction would require a data center somewhere — and quite likely some artificial intelligence even if neither of us wants to use it.
This is what American life looks like in 2026. We have built all this for convenience, without much regard for the consequences in terms of electricity use, water use, land use or much of anything else. Now we see many politicians — from Democrats such as congressional candidate Beth Macy to Republicans such as Rep. Ben Cline of Botetourt County — call for a moratorium on data center development. If we want to be serious about that, then what we really need is a dramatic intervention on how some American businesses operate — and some dramatic changes in how we live our lives.
We asked all the candidates running for U.S. Senate and House seats in Virginia this year about data centers and artificial intelligence. Most didn’t answer, but you can see the replies of those who did on our Voter Guide. Want more political news? We serve it up every Friday afternoon in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter. If you don’t mind using a data center somewhere, you can sign up here:
