31-07-2025
AI Amplifies Data Centers' Impact—Let's Make Sure It's For Good
Phillip Marangella, Chief Marketing and Product Officer, EdgeConneX.
Like hospitals where life-saving procedures are performed, schools where innovators are educated and farms where sustenance is grown, data centers' impact can be measured by the work that goes on inside them. Just a few examples: When you make a financial transaction, it is processed in a data center. When you join the work meeting online, it's hosted in a data center. When you turn to ChatGPT for therapy or companionship, you're interacting with an AI model in a data center.
Steffen Ball, the mayor of Heusenstamm, Germany—a suburb of Frankfurt that is a new hot spot for data center development—was exactly right when he said, 'Without data centers, there is no digitization.' Without data centers, there is no internet, no cloud and no AI. Artificial intelligence makes up an increasingly large share of the work being done inside data centers (27% by 2027, up from 14% today).
The Positive Impacts Of AI
AI model training and inference, which happens on GPU clusters inside data centers, has demonstrated dramatically positive impacts across industries. For example:
• In healthcare, the World Economic Forum predicts AI could get us back on track to meet the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal of universal health coverage by 2030. AI is accelerating the rate of protein discovery (45,000-fold), predicting disease diagnoses years in advance and scaling tuberculosis and breast cancer screenings by millions in India alone.
• In education, AI enables learning experiences tailored to each individual, even in places with significant teacher shortages, significantly improving educational outcomes (tutored students consistently outperform 98% of their peers).
• In agriculture, AI might be the key to sustainably feeding a population of 9.3 billion in 2050 (which will require 60% more food than today). AI is helping farmers make better-informed decisions to improve yields and resource consumption; one application has led to a 57% reduction in water usage, a 15% reduction in fertilizer usage and up to 70% yield increase.
The Economic, Environmental And Community Impact Of AI Data Centers
Like hospitals, schools and farms, the impact of the data centers running AI models extends beyond the work that goes on inside them. They are also impactful for their effects on the economies, the environments and the communities in which they operate.
Data centers are engines of economic growth. A 2025 impact analysis conducted by PwC for The Data Center Coalition found the U.S. data center industry positively impacted the economy in terms of jobs, labor income, GDP and fiscal contributions. Data centers directly and indirectly supported 4.7 million jobs and contributed $727 billion to GDP in 2023. The industry's total contribution to government finances (federal, state and local) increased by 146% between 2017 and 2023.
Data centers also impact the environment, and that is often a focal point for critics of the industry. It's true that because AI workloads are much more power-intensive than traditional workloads, AI is driving large increases in data center power consumption. As a result, data centers are consuming more water (indirectly in power generation and, in many data centers, for cooling). Without proportionate offsetting, higher power consumption also means higher carbon emissions.
Leading data center operators are leveraging AI to mitigate these environmental impacts and even enable net positive impacts. As far back as 2016, Google was using DeepMind to reduce the energy used for data center cooling by 40%. Meta's open-source AI model is generating concrete mixtures with up to a 40% lower carbon footprint than the regional industry standard. AI applications that ease the burden of hourly time matching are enabling data centers to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy.
In addition to economic and environmental impacts, data centers also impact the communities in which they're located. It is incumbent on data center operators to be good neighbors. That means mitigating impacts like noise pollution and habitat destruction. Leading developers are modifying their designs to reduce noise and proactively support biodiversity through efforts like preserving habitats for bees and planting new trees.
Being a good neighbor also means taking steps to generate positive impacts for the community. In Europe, for example, leading data center developers design their facilities to recover waste heat and channel it to local district heating systems. Many data center operators support local community initiatives with investments of time as well as monetary donations. Supporting education and career development is another way data center operators are positively impacting their communities.
AI Data Centers' Impacts Should—And Can—Be Positive
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence is dramatically amplifying the impact of data centers—by the AI work they do and their effects on economies, environments and communities. AI presents tremendous opportunities for positive impact in healthcare, education, agriculture and many other industries. It can also help us ensure data centers' economic, environmental and community impacts are positive.
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