Read previous posts in this series: Part I: Web Searches and the Data Center, Part II: Powering a Data Center, and Part III: Cooling Thirsty Data Centers.
Part IV: The Environmental Impact of Hoosier Data Centers
In the first three posts of this blog series I described in simple terms what exactly Hoosier data centers are, how we use or support them, and why they require large amounts of electricity and water. In this fourth post, I will explore the scale of electricity and water needed to support Hoosier data centers.
Just as a disclaimer, while I was researching the subject of AI and data centers, it became obvious to me that the limited topic I’m touching on in this blog – data center water and electricity needs and impacts in Indiana – reveal only a small part of the story. The gaps in my blog are topics such as the physical land needed, the concrete, steel, and other building materials, the insane tax breaks given to hyperscale centers, the air pollution created onsite (some centers use diesel engines to bridge electricity gaps), visual and noise pollution, the questionable future of data centers after the predicted AI bubble bursts, land purchases made by shell companies to shield the identity of the purchasing tech company, and probably even more that I’m missing. If I’ve done my job in whetting your appetite to better understand the data center industry in Indiana, you the reader will continue to research the environmental and social implications on these additional topics and how they affect us all. Knowledge is power. Just try to research without using AI, if you can. Note the sarcasm.
In talking about the environmental impact of data centers in this part, I will focus on the Amazon Rainier Project in New Carlisle. Being the largest and newest Hoosier hyperscale data center, it pretty much represents the standard of hyperscale centers today. The following quote is taken directly from its website: “AWS deployed this massive AI infrastructure project less than one year after it was first announced, with partner Anthropic already running workloads.” To put that in context, in early 2024 it was still farmland, and by the end of December 2025, the 1,200 acre facility will have nearly 30 buildings housing enough computers to run 1 MILLION chips. This is truly a massive infrastructure project, although the website quote is talking about AI infrastructure, I'm thinking of physical infrastructure. Also note the wording of “less than one year after it was first announced.” After researching more, I learned that this sentence is misleading, and ought to read “less than one year after it was first announced to the public, because we used a shell company, called Razor5 LLC, to hide the land purchase in order to avoid public pushback.” But I digress.
Let’s start with the electric load: Right now the Amazon Rainier Project in New Carlisle is Indiana’s second hyperscale data center, which the CEO claims to be the largest hypercenter in the world, and is expected to use more than 2.2 gigawatts of electricity by the end of 2025. How much is that? Well, the entire state of Indiana produced 97 gigawatts of electricity in 2024. This means that ONE facility will use nearly 3% of ALL electricity produced in the state while occupying 1/19,000 of the land. The power plants contracting with AES in New Carlisle are coal and methane-burning facilities, AND the hypercenter is already using massive diesel generators on site to boost energy supply. Clearly there are environmental implications to this massive use of fossil-fuel power.
The Rainier Project’s own website promises that the parent company AWS (Amazon Web Services, the tech side of Amazon) reached its “100% renewable energy goal” in 2023 by investing in renewable energy offsets globally. Although I didn’t research if this is accurate, or where exactly this renewable energy is invested, I personally find it hard to accept that the fossil fuels burned in Indiana could be “offset” by investing in renewables elsewhere. Amazon could surely finance its own renewable power here in Indiana to run its hypercenter with some of the $11 billion invested in this project. Again, I digress.
Next, the water load: The Alliance for the Great Lakes states that Indiana (and all other Great Lakes states) does not require data centers to track water usage. The Rainier Project website does not indicate how much water it will be using, only that it is implementing a highly efficient cooling system that uses minimum water. So my hands are tied here, but a quick search told me that most hyperscale data centers use up to 5 million gallons of water a day, another number that I cannot begin to comprehend. (This number is the water needed to generate the electricity at the power plant to supply the data center’s daily operations + the water used directly in the data center cooling systems.) The lack of water use transparency on the Rainier Project’s website is concerning, especially for a company that boasts a 100% renewable energy goal.
I am faced with the uncomfortable reality that new hyperscale data centers in Indiana are massive beyond a scale that I can imagine, require mind-boggling amounts of dirty energy, and use undisclosed amounts of water, and acreage, and building materials to make an intangible product: data and AI.
Maybe you know the story of the mouse and the turnip? After the farmer, and her husband, and their child, and the dog, and the cat all pulled but couldn’t pull up a giant turnip, a field mouse came along and pulled the cat’s tail. That was just enough strength needed to pull up the turnip, which they all feasted on together. If data centers are the turnip, you can be the mouse. There are many networks in Indiana pulling on the data center turnip, and they need more mice! I firmly believe that activism works, and your effort makes a difference. If you are shocked by the environmental impacts of hypercenter data centers in Indiana, please take action.
In the last part of this blog, I will offer ways for everyday Hoosiers (you, the mouse) to learn more and take action. In the meantime, check out the implications of new Hoosier data centers at the Citizens Action Coalition of Indiana, and see this great summary of anti-data center activism in Indiana from Earth Charter Indiana.
Jennifer Ehara
Winding Waters Group Executive Committee
and Hoosier Chapter Sierra Club Communications Team