Some 97.5% of data centres in the United States are located either within or close to urban areas, challenging the perception that facilities are primarily built in rural locations, a new study by researchers at NYU Tandon School of Engineering has found.
For the study, Urban infrastructure and fossil fuel industrial legacy drive US data center siting, the researchers analysed the locations of 4,283 data centres across the US, and found that facilities tend to be heavily located in a small number of metropolitan areas.
For example, the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria region hosts 610 facilities, accounting for 14.2% of the national total, while Chicago is home to 241 facilities. Dallas-Fort Worth (192), New York (163) and Phoenix (154) are other metropolitan areas with a high proportion of data centres.
The remaining 2.5% of data centres that aren’t located within or close to urban areas are situated, on average, just 8.5 miles from the nearest urban boundary.
Prevailing narrative
“There is a prevailing narrative of these data centres being somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in rural areas, being a positive force for employment, and being the future of rural communities,” said lead researcher, NYU Tandon Institute Professor Maurizio Porfiri, who is the Director of Tandon’s Center for Urban Science + Progress and of the NYU Urban Institute. “We dramatically challenged this view.”
The location of data centres has ‘a lot […] to do with what’s already there and what used to be there’, the researchers noted, with electricity capacity the strongest factor influencing where facilities are developed. Former energy plants, and increasingly coal plants, are popular locations, because existing transmission infrastructure can be reused.
The availability of skilled IT workers and high-speed internet connectivity are other motivating factors, although water availability is seen as less of a driving force.
Carbon footprint
The study also highlighted notable variations in the carbon footprint of data centres, depending on their location. Facilities that are located in states with carbon-intensive electricity grids, such as Montana and North Dakota, produce more than 350,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually.
However, comparable facilities in Vermont, New Hampshire and Arkansas generate less than 3,000 tonnes due to the availability of cleaner electricity sources.
“As [the data centre] industry rapidly grows, the limited publicly available data on its footprint creates a real challenge,’ added Ofek Lauber Bonomo, a postdoctoral researcher in Porfiri’s Dynamical Systems lab and the paper’s co-author. “That makes it more difficult for planners, for local residents, and for anyone trying to make informed decisions about their community’s future.” Read more here.
