The Korea Times
For a bunch of unremarkable warehouses, they’re generating a lot of controversy. Data centers — low-slung facilities that house the server racks and energy systems that underpin the digital economy — have become a heated issue on the campaign trail. Politicians from both parties are pushing bills to restrict them. Some want a nationwide “moratorium.” That would be a historic mistake. About 4,000 data centers now dot the U.S., according to one estimate, with 3,000 more on the way. Global capital expenditure exceeded $450 billion in 2024. Such facilities sustain much of modern life: cloud computing for communications, finance and health care; consumer services such as YouTube, TikTok and Zoom; and, increasingly, the training, fine-tuning and inference processes used by artificial intelligence models. For the areas hosting them, these centers can be a boon. For one thing, they lure tax dollars without consuming much in services; in Virginia’s Loudoun County, they generate nearly half of total revenue, funding schools, tax cuts and more. To support them, utilities often expand
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