There is an obvious question I don't see anyone asking. Why do these data centers have to be built in every state? I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
In the before-AI world, it mattered a lot where data centers were geographically located. They needed to be in the same general location as population centers for latency reasons, and they needed to be in an area that was near major fiber hubs (with multiple connections and providers) for connectivity and failover. They also needed cheap power. This means there’s only a few ideal locations in the US: places like Virginia, Oregon, Ohio, Dallas, Kansas City, Denver, SF are all big fiber hubs. Oregon for example also has cheap power and water.
Then you have the compounding effect where as you expand your data centers, you want them near your already existing data centers for inter-DC latency reasons. AWS can’t expand us-east-1 capacity by building a data center in Oklahoma because it breaks things like inter-DC replication.
Enter LLMs: massive need for expanded compute capacity, but latency and failover connectivity doesn’t really matter (the extra latency from sending a prompt to compute far away is dwarfed by the inference time, and latency for training matters even less). This opens up the new possibility for data centers to be placed in geographic places they couldn’t be before, and now the big priority’s just open land, cheap power, and water.
Cheap for who? For the companies having billions upon billions of dollars shoved into their pockets while still managing to lose all that money?
Power won't be cheap after the datacenters move in. Then the price of power goes up for everyone, including the residents who lived there before the datacenter was built. The "AI" companies won't care, they'll just do another round of funding.
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/29/electric-power-bill-costs-a...
My less snarky answer is -- we've always had data centers all over the place? When I started in web dev we deployed to boxes running in a facility down the street. That sort of construction probably dropped considerably when everyone went to "the cloud".
The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.
I mean it seems like there's already avenues to skirt around this compact?
Also, from what I can tell, this isn't some sort of ban on using water from the Great Lakes basin, it's just a framework for how the states are to manage it. It is entirely believable to me that this compact would actually support water being used for developing tech in the surrounding communities (like using it in data centers).
In my mind this is partly due to people not understanding large numbers, and also not understanding just how much water is actually in the Great Lakes. It's a huge amount - Lake Michigan has 1,288,000,000,000,000 gallons in it. Every human on earth could use close to 10gal of water per day for the next 50 years before Lake Michigan would be "dry", assuming it was never replenished. And that's just Lake Michigan. (Obviously environmental systems are more complicated than the simple division I did, and individual water usage isn't simply 10gal a day - it's just to demonstrate a point).
Now, someone else pointed out that the tragedy of the commons is a sort of death by a thousand cuts. And if anyone who shows up is allowed to draw millions of gallons a day, that can add up and certainly have negative effects. It's just important to actually understand the scale of the numbers involved, and to not let legitimate environmental concerns be cross-contaminated with just anti-tech-of-the-year sentiment, or political motivations, or whatever else might cloud the waters (pun unintended).
On the southern shore of Lake Michigan, that "few miles" changes the watershed that its part of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Basin ( https://www.erbff.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/10.8.25-Gre... for a high resolution map)
As for diversions that go to evaporative cooling, that's a big question for the data center itself and there are many designs. https://www.nrel.gov/computational-science/data-center-cooli... has some cutting edge designs, but they're more expensive to use for pumping waste heat elsewhere.
Sometimes you get data centers that look like https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2021/11/the-dalles... ... and that's not a little bit of water there.
While the Great Lakes are coming off of wet years ( https://water.usace.army.mil/office/lre/docs/waterleveldata/... ) that shouldn't be used as long term prediction of what will be available in another 10 years lest it becomes another Colorado river problem. Currently, the water levels for Lake Michigan are lower than average and not predicted to return to average in the model range. https://water.usace.army.mil/office/lre/docs/mboglwl/MBOGLWL... . You'll note that this isn't at the minimums from the 1960s... and the Great Lakes Compact was signed in 2008.
You can search the database for the authorized diversions of the water. https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/historical-information/ba...
For example, Nine Mile Point - https://www.glslcompactcouncil.org/historical-information/ba...
Putting them all in one or two places isn’t good for reliability, disaster resilience, and other things that benefit from having them distributed.
Data centers do more than just run LLMs. It’s a good thing when your data is backed up to geographically diverse data centers and your other requests can be routed to a nearby data center.
Have you ever tried to play fast paced multiplayer games on a server in a different country? It’s not fun. The speed of light limits round trip times.
> I guarantee it's not to run LLMs.
Are you trying to imply something conspiratorial?
Likely there's some kind of tax incentive for the datacenter to be built in one place over another, but I have to imagine that the local county is going to net some sort of increase to it's revenue, which can be used to then support the town.
There's also the benefit of the land the datacenter is on being developed. Even if that is done in financial isolation from the town/county, a pretty fancy new building designed for tech is being built. Should the datacenter go belly up, that's still a useable building/development that has some value.
When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.
Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
And in the same way that construction-damaged roads can lead to costs on everyone else - the development of that land employed people, and that is a positive thing for construction workers and their families (more than just financially).
Just because you can point at negative consequences doesn't mean positive ones don't exist as well. It's rarely black and white as to the net effects of things like this. You could/should even be considering what doing a build-out like this does for the reputation of a city, and the sense of optimism it can bring to a local community that might otherwise be left behind, completely out of the picture. There's another world where a small town appears not in an article about a new datacenter (or the possible ensuing city renege boondoggle) but as a small blip in a story about how small towns in this country have decayed as a result of being passed by during the current tech "boom".
It's also not all that trivial (or cheap) to just transport a datacenter to another state, or even county. You'd have to be pretty sure that whatever tax you're trying to now avoid is more than the (potentially) zero-tax new build or relocation you'd have to do to "escape".
At the end of the day, it's the responsibility of the local government to make sure that the deal is a net benefit to the community. Maybe that is too much to expect lol
Constant additions, reconfigurations, etc.
It’s effectively a full time job for an electrician crew or three.
Of course once the facility goes away entirely the job does too. But so goes a factory or anything else.