NEWSWEEK 06/11/25
By Dr. Michael Shank and US Congressman Hank Johnson

There is a new menace in America that is doubling down on fossil fuels, ratcheting up planet-warming emissions, overwhelming energy grids, and raising energy prices for communities.

It’s the rapid, unfettered burgeoning of data centers powering our rising artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud use. Whether in Virginia, Georgia, Utah, Illinois, Arizona, or Nevada—which host some of the world’s biggest data centers—these massive energy-and-water-sucking facilities are cropping up everywhere to meet rising data demands. All those videos we post account for half of the internet traffic, but now AI use will soon dominate the cloud.

Here’s the problem. That data growth requires massive amounts of energy to keep videos streaming and AI generating. Rather than investing in clean, renewable energy sources to provide the energy required to meet the growing need, power companies are instead expanding use of pollution-causing fossil fuels.

Georgia Power, for example, is requesting permission from regulators to reverse course on clean energy and invest heavily in fossil fuels to meet data centers’ demand. Although Georgia Power is seeking a plethora of options like renewables, fossil fuels, and nuclear to power these data centers, the fact remains that they’re asking for more coal and gas-fired plants.

Atlanta has overtaken Northern Virginia as the country’s top data center market for leasing activity in 2024, according to data from CBRE. This, coupled with the announcement of a new mega data center coming to the Atlanta region—which will require more energy than the maximum output of one of Georgia Power’s two new nuclear reactors—should give everyone in the Atlanta metro pause.

Data-dependent industrial giants like Amazon and others, meanwhile, are lobbying legislators to quash state efforts to curb emissions from data centers. Some state legislatures remain undeterred, thankfully, and are pushing back. A bipartisan group of Virginia lawmakers is trying to establish energy and environmental guardrails for the data center industry, which has largely gone unchecked. Legislators in Georgia, Texas, and California have also introduced bills to protect rate-paying residents.

But with Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Oracle, and OpenAI planning to spend tens of billions of dollars on data centers in places like Ohio, Louisiana, and Texas, unless guardrails are in place the U.S. will witness one of the largest increases of CO2 emissions, at a time when we should be reducing the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere.

There is another way that isn’t so fossil fuel dependent, and it’s one in which China is leading.

Chinese data centers are witnessing massive growth, similar to what we’re seeing in the U.S. and metro Atlanta, and they are expected to triple their data centers’ electricity demand by 2030. They’ve put in place a goal of powering more than 80 percent of their data center footprint with clean energy by the end of this year.

China is the world’s leader—by far—in terms of renewable energy investments, though it remains to be seen whether they’ll meet their 80 percent goal. At least they’ve got an aspirational goal, which the U.S. lacks. Without goals or guardrails, we face a race to the bottom with uncontrolled, harmful carbon emissions polluting our air and water, with millions suffering health challenges as a result.

To be fair, Google, Apple, Amazon, and other data giants have made significant investments in renewable energy to offset their data centers. Google, for example, announced new plans to site wind, solar, and battery projects adjacent to their data centers to lighten the load on the energy grid and the planet.

This is good, and we need more of it. Co-locating data centers with renewable energy and battery storage should be the default. America has plenty of clean wind and solar power and space to do it, like in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and in Georgia. This is what energy security can look like, and it’s how we lessen the load on the grid and ensure new power is clean, not polluting.

None of this will happen without visionary goal setting, like what we’re seeing in China. They have already outpaced America in renewable energy production, and they’re planning to outpace us in clean data dominance, too.

We could meet this challenge with the kind of American ingenuity that put us on the moon. Or we can watch the U.S. get outperformed. We choose to meet the challenge and put America on the map for its forward-thinking clean data dominance. Now is the time to lead.

Hank Johnson, a U.S. congressman from Georgia, is a senior member of the House Judiciary and Transportation & Infrastructure committees and a longtime advocate for the environment and clean energy.

Michael Shank is an adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.