Public Health Costs of Data Centers and What Policy Can Do
Date Posted: September 3, 2026
Posted In: Discussion, Environment/Sustainability, Ideas,
From The Network for Public Health Law: Data centers are facilities that house computing and storage servers. Data centers have existed since the 1940s, but they have come into the spotlight in the 2020s as computing and AI demands increase. To satisfy the increased demand for data processing and storage infrastructure, favorable data center policies were implemented, but now, data centers face growing bipartisan resistance across the country. One major cause for concern is the public health impact of these data centers.
Environmental Health Considerations
Data centers’ energy demands strain the existing electric grid. Fifty-six percent of data centers’ power comes from fossil fuels, which, when burned, increases air pollution and contributes to rising global temperatures. Air pollution contributes to a variety of health issues: asthma, lung cancer, cardiovascular disease, and increases infant mortality. Data centers also cause surrounding areas to be hotter via the data heat island effect. It’s estimated that up to 343 million people worldwide may face a land surface temperature increase of up to 16°F by living near data centers, posing extreme heat threats to these communities.
Extreme heat can cause death via heatstroke and can also exacerbate preexisting health conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and asthma. In addition to rising temperatures and more frequent extreme heat events, global warming can also cause more extreme weather events – extreme cold, droughts, wildfires, cyclones, heavy precipitation, floods, and more. These events are destabilizing to human health, increasing all-cause morbidity and mortality. Data centers’ energy use and air pollution contribute to and intensify the effects of global warming and cause associated health risks.
Because data centers consume tremendous amounts of energy and heat up easily, they require constant cooling. Estimates from 2021 show that data centers in the U.S. use nearly 450 million gallons of freshwater per day, but this figure is incomplete and likely an undercount, given that one-third of data centers do not collect or report data on water consumption, and many more data centers have been built since that time. There is also a discrepancy in current data center water use reporting: many tech companies report data centers’ direct water use but indirect water use remains unreported or underreported.
Data centers, as they are currently built, strain freshwater resources and are associated with preventable illness. Freshwater is a limited resource (only one percent of the available water supply) that is already being depleted due to climate change.
Rising temperatures cause more freshwater to evaporate and stay in the atmosphere instead of staying on the ground. Data centers further exacerbate this problem by demanding freshwater use at a time where nearly 30 million people in the U.S. struggle to have enough water to drink, cook, shower, and use in daily life.
Lack of access to freshwater makes people vulnerable to dehydration, malnutrition, and exposes people to waterborne diseases. The associated mortality rates are also staggering: over one million people die annually around the world from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related diseases alone.