Banking on data centers – Chicago Reader

Right now, somewhere out there, a data center is working just for you. 

Anything that flows through your laptop, tablet, or smartphone is driven in part by one of these massive computing and storage facilities. Data centers—on average 100,000 square feet in size—house, process, and distribute digital information 24 hours a day.

Chicagoland’s ample land, water, and money make the area a mecca for the booming data center industry. According to a June report from real estate and investment firm CBRE, Chicago ranks third among cities for data center inventory. The city has four state-backed data centers and the northwestern suburb of Elk Grove Village has another nine. On October 2, Governor J.B. Pritzker unveiled plans for a new facility in Aurora—that city’s second.

But data centers aren’t risk-free. They require a substantial amount of electricity to operate around the clock, every day of the year. “To meet the demand on existing power grids, states will have to grapple with adding more capacity while also attempting to meet state renewable energy targets,” says Helena Volzer, senior agriculture policy manager at the Alliance for the Great Lakes. 

An October analysis from the U.S. Energy Information Administration found that data centers are increasingly turning to nuclear power. For example, Microsoft plans to reactivate one of the reactors at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, home to the country’s worst nuclear incident, to power its data centers in the mid-Atlantic. Three Mile Island closed in 1979 following a partial meltdown of one of its reactors, but the deal with Microsoft will reopen the plant in 2028. 

The Palisades nuclear power plant in Michigan is likewise slated to reopen in October 2025. It was once called one of the worst-performing nuclear reactors in the country by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission and, in 2013, leaked 80 gallons of radioactive waste into Lake Michigan. The plant opened in 1971 and closed in 2022 after a control rod failure. Power plants typically have a lifespan of 30 years, although some operate longer; Palisades was open for 51. 

Kevin Kamps, a radioactive waste watchdog at the advocacy group Beyond Nuclear, worries that data centers are an excuse to throw caution to the wind. He says it’s “unwise, shameful, and unacceptable” to restart closed nuclear power plants, generate more nuclear waste, and gut environmental protection laws. 

Turning to nuclear, Kamps says, leaves officials to play “radioactive Russian roulette in terms of extremely high risks to safety, security, health, and the environment—as well as agriculture.” The use of both Palisades and Three Mile Island represents “direct threats to agriculture and fresh water for drinking and irrigation.”

Pronuclear advocates suggest that while such power plants are expensive to build, they generate power at low costs. Nuclear power is advertised as cleaner than coal and fossil fuels because it doesn’t directly emit carbon dioxide. It also uses less land and is less reliant on weather than wind and solar, making it appealing for environmentalists and populations that find wind farms an eyesore. Data centers also require the same amount of energy at all times, and since nuclear operates similarly, it isn’t difficult to remain consistent. 

Data centers do more than just increase increase the demand on power grids. They also put pressure on the water supply. “Data centers do require large amounts of electricity, and generating that electricity via coal, natural gas, or nuclear-fired power plants also requires water for cooling,” Volzer says. As it stands, almost three-quarters of water drawn from the Great Lakes is used for electrical power generation, according to a 2023 fact sheet from the Great Lakes Commission. The region is home to the world’s largest supply of fresh water—but it’s not an infinite resource, Volzer adds.

Luckily, protections for our water exist under the Great Lakes–Saint Lawrence River Basin Compact. The agreement prohibits the diversion of Great Lakes water (with limited exceptions), requires the states to manage water use, sets water conservation and efficiency goals, and establishes common water use reporting protocols. 

“The compact’s prohibition on diversions is designed to generally ensure that Great Lakes water and groundwater stays in the Great Lakes Basin,” says Volzer. “This means that proposals to pipe Great Lakes water for any use, including data centers, to a location outside the Great Lakes region are legally and logistically not in the cards—the compact’s existence and operation prohibits it.”

Andrew Chien, the William Eckhardt distinguished service professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, says it’s possible for data centers to run on less water. “While all data centers will recirculate water internally for cooling, and a small amount of water is consumed by that, by far the largest part of data-center water consumption is for evaporative cooling.” Evaporative cooling uses water evaporation to lower the temperature of the air. Data centers that use this cooling method consume about 25.5 million liters of water per day, Chien says. “We already know how to eliminate this by using other cooling techniques.”

So, will one data center put a strain on the Great Lakes? Volzer says, “In a vacuum, the simple answer is probably not—but nothing happens in a vacuum. In the real world, the important and complicated questions to be answered regarding any large use of water are whether and how the compact will apply, how that singular use stacks up cumulatively in the landscape of other water use and climate change, and how states are utilizing their conservation programs to sustainably and responsibly manage all large uses of water.”

In addition to sucking up thousands of gallons of water and overloading the grid, there are a host of other environmental concerns that come with building more data centers. According to recent research, data centers have roughly the same carbon footprint as the aviation industry, another significant source of global pollution. The Guardian in September found that Google, Microsoft, and Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions were seven times higher than what the companies reported. Other environmental concerns include the batteries used in data centers, which require mining metals, and noise pollution from cooling systems and servers, which is comparable to heavy traffic. 

CyrusOne, which owns the facility in Aurora, will receive a tax incentive package as part of the state Data Center Investment Program. According to the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity’s 2023 annual report, tax breaks for all data centers in Illinois have totaled $6.5 billion in investments and 469 total jobs since 2019. 

As the city faces a $1 billion shortfall heading into the 2025 fiscal year, data centers may be the ticket to balancing the budget without increasing city taxes. In September, Alderperson Gilbert Villegas from the 36th Ward successfully pushed an ordinance that will bring more data centers to Chicago. Villegas, who chairs the City Council’s Economic, Capital and Technology Development Committee, wrote the ordinance because he wants more city data stored in the city instead of paying millions for others to store it elsewhere. 

Neighborhoods on Chicago’s south side are most at risk of being the future home to data centers, as they have large vacant areas of industrial land. In July, Pritzker announced that the first quantum computing campus in the country would be built on the former U.S. Steel site on the southeast side of the city. The plot of land, abandoned since 1992, has been renamed the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park and will be anchored by PsiQuantum, a California-based startup. The campus would also include a defense-funded lab by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Quantum campuses and data centers are different. Data centers house and store data, while quantum centers house quantum computers. Nevertheless, both require immense water cooling and have environmental implications. Residents and community groups requested government officials slow down campus construction due to concerns over environmental and health safety. The neighborhood has long been ignored and used as a dumping ground for toxic waste. In September, the Alliance of the Southeast and 80 local residents wrote a letter to companies and lawmakers that demanded “a public transparent environmental impact study and environmental impact plan that includes topics such as effects on water, noise, emissions, chemical use, and a clear transparent assessment of site contamination as well as remediation plans and risk mitigations.”

The letter continues, “Too often, neighbors in this area and other parts of Chicago are not invited and are left in the dark in the planning stages of planned developments impacting our communities, or a sham of public engagement is made after all the decisions have been made behind closed doors.”

On November 21, the Chicago Plan Commission granted preliminary approval to zoning changes needed for construction. ​​The park will be located right on Lake Michigan, which could heat water used for cooling systems, impacting an already stressed body of water.

While local alderpeople and politicians see data centers as a means for economic growth and jobs, staying alert about the environmental impacts is crucial for a changing digital landscape, especially since data centers in Chicago aren’t going away anytime soon. 

Volzer says the Great Lakes region will probably be home to many more data centers in the future. “Policymakers will need to address increasing demand for water and ask tough questions about who will benefit from that water use and how.”