Why the data center explosion is a bad thing for Washington state

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, June 2, 2026

When I was an out of work journalist in the late-1990s, I took up web design/development as a hobby.

I bought a custom-built computer, learned a modicum of code and designed my first websites with Microsoft Publisher. I quickly outgrew my IBM clone’s horsepower, RAM and storage capacity, which led me to start tinkering with video cards, RAM chips and hard drives. Eventually, upon landing my dream job, I had to learn server management for both web hosting and streaming media.

Hard drive space and performance was at a premium back then. Replacing a hard drive in a personal computer cost you a pretty penny, and then you had to reinstall all of your software. Often you had to delete files before you could upload new ones.

And back in the halcyon Web 1.0 days, all manner of services charged you for the hard drive space your files occupied, extra if you exceeded that limit. We all owned our software and railed against what is now known as “cloud computing.” Desks and shelves were lined with boxes and instruction manuals for Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Macromedia, you name it.

Web 2.0 came along and hard drive space limitations just seemed to disappear. Subscription-based cloud computing has become all the rage. Even if a company charges for space, you get a healthy allotment for free and rarely do you butt up against your limit.

Facebook limits the size of an individual image, however, you can upload as many as you like. YouTube is the online service that boggles the mind. High definition video takes up more hard drive space than anything else, yet YouTube has no limits that I’m aware of.

Space isn’t the only thing to consider when it comes to the way we navigate the digital world. It’s processing power. Everything is cloud computing now — social media, Adobe Creative Suite, blogging, project management, productivity software, such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, time and attendance, office phone systems — the list goes on. You can’t even play XBOX games without an XBOX Live account. Who owns and manages these servers and data centers?

So, if hard drive space is no longer an issue, and we’ve transitioned our digital experience back to the mainframe for work and play, what’s the big deal with data centers? Since the data center boom of the 1990s and the proliferation of cloud computing, the next iteration of the internet has reared its ugly head — Web 3.0. While hardly in its nascent stages, there is more to come with blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and decentralization. Blockchain and decentralization are topics that we don’t have room for in this column, so we’ll skip right to AI.

AI, as we understand it, dates back to the 1950s, however, today’s uses were predicted by writers such as George Orwell, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick in what can only be described as cautionary tales — rogue robots, government surveillance of the citizenry, etc.

While AI has its benefits in industry-specific applications like medicine, what has been unleashed on the general public curates unadulterated, out-of-context material and cobbles it together based on natural language instructions known as “prompts.” These “chat bots” can write a book for you, automate tasks, handle your business’ customer service, do your homework, turn pictures of you into an action figure or cartoon, create marketing copy, or make promotional graphics for you … they can even keep you company.

Every search engine gives you an AI summary of your query. Your email inbox can be summarized by AI. Spelling and grammar checkers are AI-powered now. AI has permeated just about every digital activity and task and we don’t even know when it happened.

The biggest problem with generative AI is the strain on infrastructure. In April 2025, Felicity Barringer wrote for Stanford University, “The growth of artificial intelligence, which uses larger and more complex chips needing far more power, only accelerates the power demand. More transmission lines are needed to get the power to the centers. The share of states’ and communities’ energy consumed by data centers has grown dramatically: In Arizona, they use 7.4 percent of the state’s power, in Oregon 11.4 percent, according to Visual Capitalist. … It’s not just electricity that is needed by these centers, which are now growing to brobdingnagian sizes to accommodate AI’s computing demands. They need significant amounts of water to keep cool, and new ones will need more. The new computer chips that are designed to produce artificial intelligence, like Nvidia’s Blackwell chip, use far more electricity and therefore need more cooling than the older generation of chips.”

While Washington generates more hydroelectric power than any other state, and while Kurt Miller and Kelly Fukai write in the The Seattle Times that winter stressors are the bigger threat to our state’s power system, the proliferation of more data centers would only add to those stressors. If demand during our most inclement months is already outpacing supply, what would more data centers do? And then add in the water factor.

AI isn’t going away. We’ve been told by far too many people that it’s here to stay. But adding more and more data centers just to house the servers that serve as the engines for AI will do more harm than good to the environment and the populace in more ways than one. Think about that before you ask a chat bot to turn you into a cartoon superhero.

Jerry Knaak is a reporter and social media guru for The Daily World.