Data centres account for about 1.5%, or 415 Terawatt-Hours (TWh), of the world’s total annual electricity consumption, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
This has grown by 12% over the last five years and is on course to more than double towards 945 TWh by 2030, primarily due to the substantial growth of energy-intensive computing driven by the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
Consequently, over the past year, social concerns around AI have also grown, with data centres serving as a highly visible flashpoint for concerns around energy prices and the environment. Governments worldwide are pushing to attract AI computing infrastructure, but must grapple with data centres’ demands on resources and mounting local opposition.
Opposition to data centres from the US to India tends to focus on three major themes: land, power and water.
Data centres can occupy vast swathes of land, with Meta’s Prometheus site (the company’s first gigawatt-scale AI supercluster) in Ohio measuring “a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan”.
In countries with weaker property protections, some have complained of being shouldered aside in favour of tech construction, including Indian farmers in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
Data centres filled with top-of-the-line chips can draw the energy of a city. At 630 megawatts, according to industry tracker Epoch AI, Prometheus is equivalent to around half a million American family homes.
Bloomberg News found in a September 2025 analysis that electricity could be as much as 267% more expensive in areas of the US with high concentrations of data centres. And companies’ off-grid generators — such as SpaceXAI’s gas turbines at its Colossus facility in Memphis — have drawn complaints of their own.
As the chips get hot while they work, data centres need cooling, mostly using water.
While the absolute amount of water used is small — around 0.3% of total supply in the US, according to electronics magazine IEEE Spectrum — many are built in areas already facing high water stress.
American campaign group Humans First called for a “national day of protest” against “the unaccountable buildout of data centres” on July 18.
Beyond America, campaigners across Europe have challenged data centre projects on grounds from environmental concerns to claims governments have granted undue favours, such as a legal action in Spain’s Aragon region against a massive data centre buildout by Amazon.
And in densely-populated Japan, a shortage of space has projects being planned in or near residential neighbourhoods.
That has prompted legal action from some residents, such as against a proposed new data centre in Tokyo commuter town Inzai, which already hosts 10 facilities.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has vowed to pass laws requiring data centres to feed in to the power grid more than they draw and minimise water usage.
To solve the energy challenges, the tech sector is adopting new approaches. It accounted for around 40% of all corporate power purchase agreements for renewables signed in 2025, and is also now a major source of momentum for the nuclear and advanced geothermal industries.
For sure, data centres are a vital infrastructure supporting the ever-growing use of cloud storage, social media, AI, and streaming services. But they’re also an increasingly hot topic of the clean transition.
Looking forward, policymakers can also have tools on hand to manage affordability issues, including those that encourage the smart integration of data centres into grids and incentivise data centres to operate more flexibly, according to the IEA.