The Cloud Has a Body: How Data Centers Are Rewriting the American Landscape
- Lucy Edo
- Nov 12
- 5 min read
The Cloud Has a Body: What Data Centers Really Are
You’ve heard of data centers popping up across America—from Umatilla, Oregon, to Atlanta, Georgia. They are the physical lungs of our digital lives: humming, glowing, and endlessly expanding. Every selfie, prompt, and transaction passes through these massive industrial warehouses where the internet becomes tangible.
To the average person, “the cloud” sounds ethereal. In truth, it’s a planetary machine made of concrete, copper, and carbon. These facilities house thousands of servers stacked in racks, cooled by powerful HVAC systems that consume vast amounts of electricity and water. They are the new infrastructure of intelligence, reshaping economies, communities, and ecosystems.
America’s New Factories: The Double-Edged Rise of AI Infrastructure
Like the steel mills of the last century, data centers have become both a source of progress and a symbol of extraction.
Pros: they enable faster communication, support cloud-based jobs, and even bring short-term construction and electrical work to smaller towns. For communities in eastern Oregon or rural Georgia, the arrival of Google or Microsoft can mean a surge of local investment.
Cons: decisions to build these centers rarely involve public input. They drain local power grids and freshwater resources at alarming rates. A single large facility can use as much electricity as 80,000 U.S. homes [1] and millions of gallons of water per day [2].
Technology once promised a digital future without weight. Instead, it has created a new industrial revolution—one that hums behind fences and fiber cables rather than factory gates.
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The $38 Billion Cloud Deal: Inside OpenAI’s Massive AWS Agreement
In late 2024, OpenAI—the company behind ChatGPT—signed one of the largest cloud-computing contracts in history: a $38 billion agreement with Amazon Web Services over seven years [3]. The deal secures the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy advanced AI models at global scale.
This move joins a growing list of alliances between AI firms and infrastructure giants: OpenAI with AWS, Oracle, and the UAE; Anthropic with Google Cloud; and Elon Musk’s xAI with Oracle. Together, these partnerships are transforming compute power into geopolitical leverage.
As the newsletter Generative AI summarized, “If compute is the new oil, OpenAI just bought a refinery the size of a continent.” It’s a poetic truth—one that captures how digital empires are built not from colonies but from cooling towers.
If Compute Is the New Oil: Who Controls the Digital Economy?
Power in the AI age is no longer measured in barrels or bytes but in teraflops per second. The world’s most valuable companies now sell processing power the way OPEC once sold petroleum.
OpenAI is rich in talent but not yet profitable. NVIDIA, with a market cap nearing $5 trillion in 2025 [4], supplies the GPUs that make large-scale AI possible. Together, they illustrate a new hierarchy: those with brains feed those with bandwidth, and both depend on vast physical infrastructure.
The shift raises uncomfortable questions: when corporations can outspend governments on digital infrastructure, who governs the algorithms that govern us?
Convenience, Consent, and the Cost of Data Privacy
I use AI every day—to write, to think, to create for 365 Days of Shade. But every prompt I type becomes a fragment of training data. Every document stored in the cloud adds another byte to the planetary archive of myself.
Our $20 subscriptions don’t purchase privacy—they purchase compute time. We are not only users; we are unpaid contributors to an intelligence economy that feeds on participation.
As data centers multiply, so does the invisible trail of personal information we produce. The cloud’s convenience conceals its cost: surveillance, energy, and an ever-tightening feedback loop where humans train machines that will soon outperform them.
The New Creative Class: How AI Is Reshaping Human Work
In South Korea, LG heir Brian Hoo is investing in UtopAI East, a project merging film production with artificial intelligence. Its promise: AI will not replace artists but relieve them of the “grunt work”—editing, scheduling, rendering.
This mirrors a global trend. Studios experiment with synthetic actors; marketing agencies generate full campaigns without a human copywriter. Advocates call it liberation from tedium. Critics call it the slow erasure of creative labor.
Efficiency is replacing experience. The question is not whether AI can make art, but whether we still value the friction that makes art human.
The Hidden Cost of the Cloud: Energy, Water, and Inequality
Every byte has a footprint. The International Energy Agency estimates data centers consumed about 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022—roughly the same as all of France [5]—and could double by 2026.
Cooling these centers requires immense quantities of water. Microsoft’s 2023 environmental report revealed a 34% spike in water use in a single year as it expanded its AI infrastructure [6]. Similar concerns echo in the Netherlands and Ireland, where local officials have paused new builds due to grid strain [7].
Subsidies make it worse: in states like Oregon, tax incentives allow tech giants to pay less for electricity than residents [8]. We fund them twice—through our subscriptions and through our utility bills.
Ironically, the same states struggling with housing and drought can summon the political will to power a server farm capable of lighting entire cities.
The Way Forward: Designing a More Humane Cloud
The story doesn’t have to end in extraction. Technology can be redesigned to honor both progress and planet.
Some nations are showing how. Finland has pioneered data centers that recycle waste heat to warm homes [9]. The Netherlands requires operators to disclose environmental data publicly. In the U.S., local governments in Virginia and Oregon are exploring renewable-only power mandates for new facilities.
Civic movements are emerging too: nonprofits like the Open Data Institute and Algorithmic Justice League advocate for transparency and ethical design. Cities can legislate digital environmental-impact reports just as they do for air or water pollution.
And individuals—yes, even casual users—can push for responsible providers, reduce redundant cloud storage, and support platforms that prioritize sustainability.
Innovation isn’t the enemy. Indifference is. If we can build machines that learn, we can build systems that last.
The Future Has Weight: Why AI’s Footprint Is Everyone’s Problem
Technology has always been the story of human extension—tools that reach beyond our hands, wheels that move beyond our feet. But today, the extension risks outliving the hand that built it.
The “cloud” is not weightless; it is wired into our economy, our environment, and our ethics. The next frontier of intelligence will be decided not only in labs but in legislatures and living rooms.
The question is no longer if AI will change the world, but who will choose how it does.
Call to Action
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References
U.S. Department of Energy – “Data Center Energy Efficiency.” (2023). https://www.energy.gov
Columbia Climate School – “The Hidden Water Use of Data Centers.” (2023). https://news.climate.columbia.edu
Reuters – “OpenAI signs $38 billion cloud deal with AWS.” (2024). https://www.reuters.com
Bloomberg – “NVIDIA Market Cap Nears $5 Trillion.” (2025). https://www.bloomberg.com
International Energy Agency – “Electricity 2024 Report.” (IEA, 2024). https://www.iea.org
The Verge – “Microsoft’s AI Push Drives 34% Jump in Water Use.” (2023). https://www.theverge.com
The Guardian – “Netherlands and Ireland Put Brakes on New Data Centers.” (2022). https://www.theguardian.com
Oregon Live – “Tax Breaks and Power Costs for Data Centers.” (2023). https://www.oregonlive.com
BBC Future – “How Finland Turns Data-Center Heat into Warm Homes.” (2024). https://www.bbc.com/future
Author’s Note:
365 Days of Shade explores the intersection of technology, culture, and ethics—where awareness becomes action and information becomes imagination.
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