Kite & Key Media: Are Data Centers Wasting Water and Raising Electric Bills?
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/10/06/kite_key_media_are_data_centers_wasting_water_and_raising_electric_bills.html

Are data centers draining our water and jacking up our electric bills? That's the fear behind the nationwide backlash. But the numbers tell a much calmer story … at least for now.

America has been building data centers since the late 1950s. They're the internet's engine room: AI runs on them, but so do video calls, online gaming, and the text you probably shouldn't send your ex. What's new is the backlash, driven mostly by fears about water and electricity.

On water, the comparisons are revealing. A typical data center uses a little less water in a day than a typical golf course. And one viral statistic that stoked a lot of the alarm turned out to be off … by a factor of 4,500.

On electricity, data centers are big users, but so are plenty of other industries. And the research so far suggests they haven't been driving up household power bills. If anything, the opposite.

The real risk is that demand outruns our ability to build the power supply to serve it. And with Americans using more data every year, that's a problem worth taking seriously.