[roving]

There’s something more going on. There is no reason to have 5000 data centers. We just gotta notice that our electric bills are going up 7% because of a data center.

[SeekAndFind]

If you removed data centers, the country would lose:

banking/finance

healthcare IT

logistics

transportation

communications

cloud services

AI

government systems

So the question isn’t “Why do we need 5,000?”

The question is “How do we keep up with demand from 330 million people and millions of businesses?”

So, Why the U.S. is building so many data centers

Three structural reasons:

1. AI demand is exploding

Training and running AI models requires massive GPU clusters.
This is the fastest-growing category of electricity demand in the U.S.

2. Every industry is digitizing

Healthcare, finance, logistics, manufacturing, etc — all rely on cloud computing.

3. The U.S. ( and the Trump administration) wants the infrastructure onshore

If the U.S. doesn’t build these facilities, China will.
This is now a national competitiveness issue, not just a tech issue.

[BroJoeK]

roving: "There’s something more going on.
There is no reason to have 5000 data centers.
We just gotta notice that our electric bills are going up 7% because of a data center."

mythenjoseph: "I have yet to be given any information of exactly what these “data centers” are going to produce that is tangible to the general public!
Who is going to benefit from any of this crap?
What will these multiple facilities produce that is in anyway beneficial to the general public?"

Meta's Promethius Data Center, New Albany Ohio:

So, first of all, "data centers" are not new, they go back decades under different names:

1. 1960s–80s: Computer centers (mainframes)
2. 1980s–90s: Machine rooms / IT facilities
3. 1990s–2010: Server farms + telecom switching centers
4. 2010–today: Integrated data centers (cloud + AI + networking)

So, the majority of those "5,000 data centers" are just the old server farms and IT facilities upgraded and renamed as "data centers".
They are neither large nor controversial.
They've been there for years & decades.

What are they used for?
Everything having to do with business, finance, telecommunications, scientific & other computing.

What's new?
A relative handful of giant gigawatt scale data centers being constructed or planned.
The physical footprint on the gigawatt data center "campuses" is measured in square miles (1 to 3), construction costs in the $hundreds of billions and water usage (for cooling) in the millions of gallons per day.
In short, they can consume the resources of a small city.

At the same time, permanent employment there is counted in the dozens to a few hundred, around 300 at the Prometheus site -- engineers, technicians, mechanics, maintenance, logistics, security, supervision, etc. -- not the thousands a major manufacturing plant would employ.

Most of the hundreds of new data centers being planned & constructed are much smaller and correspondingly less controversial.

The value of the largest new data centers is in their ability to tackle the toughest computing problems such as weather forecasts, climate models, disaster prediction, DNA sequencing, drug discovery, protein folding, disease modeling, aircraft and ship design, energy system modeling, materials science and many others.