Data center land use issues are fake
We have plenty of land, data centers provide more revenue per unit area than any other building, and we should have way less farmland
A few weeks ago I shared my axis of which data center concerns I currently think are most real and fake:
I’ve already covered water use, water poisoning, and infrasounds. There’s just one fake issue left to address: land use.
Like biographies often use their subject as a prism through which to understand the world at the time, I try to use data centers as a prism through which to understand much larger but invisible environmental problems, hidden by our tendencies toward populism and localism that data centers offend. This post will focus a lot on the main ridiculous ways we use land in America, which (like most of our water issues) is downstream of the fact that farmers are shielded from popular criticism by political alliances and folk intuitions about the honest toil of growing food. By the end of this post, I hope that you will be much more skeptical of headlines like this:
and of the idea that data centers purchasing farmland is a unique evil.
I want to be clear that I’m not claiming that data centers should be built anywhere and everywhere. There are lots of places where they’ve been built too close to people’s homes. This post is exclusively about the question of whether data centers waste the land they’re on compared to what they compete with, and my theme will be that they mostly don’t compete with things we really need more of, like housing, and mostly compete with things we need less of, like farmland.
Contents
Data centers are the absolute most optimized use of land physically possible
America isn’t lacking in land
Data centers mostly don’t compete with housing
The fact that data centers don’t create many jobs makes their land use way smaller
What about the land use of new power and transmission capacity data centers will require?
We have way too much farmland
Question farmers
About 1.5% of the contiguous United States is used for a farmer handout: ethanol
A lot of people are really bad at thinking about farms in a marginal rather than an absolute way
What about the effects of climate change on farmable land?
More examples of the goofy ways our politics and land use is warped by farmers
Some bad recent articles on data center land use
“Farmer Hailed as Hero for Rejecting Huge Payment to Turn His Land Into a Giant Data Center”
A data center using as much land as 51 Walmarts
“This Land is Their Land”
Data centers are the absolute most optimized use of land physically possible
There are no other large buildings that are crammed as full as possible with objects that have been optimized down to the literal atom to deliver the absolute most performance possible. The most advanced and complex supply chains in the world are all working together to make the servers inside data centers as close to the physical limits of manufacturing as anything humans currently produce.
Northern Virginia has 13% of all global data center capacity, and there Loudoun County has by far the largest concentration. But data centers only take up 3% of Loudoun’s land, and they generate 38% of all county general fund revenue. Using county tax info, I made a rough guess of how much tax revenue in combined real property and personal property data centers are generating per unit land area (including the land around the buildings the data center companies own) compared to other big sources of revenue in Loudoun. Comparisons like this get a little ridiculous.
America isn’t lacking in land
My best guess is that by 2030, all data centers in America will occupy about 1,400 square miles. The vast majority of this will be land around the data center, the buildings themselves will collectively take up about 25 square miles.1
Here’s a chart of how America currently uses land:
1,400 square miles is about 3.5 squares here, 3.5x as much as the land we currently dedicate to Christmas trees:
With the buildings themselves taking up an incredibly small part of that:
By 2030, data center buildings themselves will take up 1/15th of the land area we use to grow Christmas trees.
Data centers are not economical to build way far out in completely undeveloped land, because they need access to reliable large power grids. However, data centers also do not at all need to be built in or near dense residential areas. The vast majority of the contiguous US is within reach of high power lines, and the places where data centers actually get built are mostly farmland or low-value scrub.
Data centers mostly don’t compete with housing
Some people worry that data centers take up land that could be used for housing instead, but data center companies want fundamentally different types of land than where there are housing shortages. Housing demand is overwhelmingly concentrated in and near existing urban cores, like California, the Boston-to-DC corridor where I live, Seattle, Denver, Austin, or Nashville. These are expensive because demand is high in specific neighborhoods that are already built out. The blockers on housing in those places are zoning, parking minimums, height limits, environmental review, neighborhood opposition, and the general legal apparatus that makes it illegal to build apartment buildings on most residential land in America. It’s rarely access to raw land.
Data centers want flat, cheap, large amounts of land with access to high-voltage transmission, fiber, and water for cooling, in places that permit a windowless industrial building. Anywhere where there’s significant housing demand is going to have land that’s too expensive for large data centers to economically build. Data centers are mostly only built in exurban and rural land on the fringes of metro areas.
Data center land use is for the most part not competing with housing or contributing to the housing shortage. They want fundamentally different land.
The fact that data centers don’t create many jobs makes their land use way smaller
If a new business moves into a town that requires a lot of jobs, it might require a lot of additional people to move there. This creates demand for massive land use changes. There will be more homes, commercial buildings, public services, and roads. I don’t think this is bad at all, but for people worried about the land use changes in a specific area, a data center has a much lighter impact per unit of revenue generated because it requires so few employees.
A town allowing a large data center to be built is kind of like them purchasing a very large computer that passively hums in the background generating tax revenue with minimal maintenance required. It doesn’t require a reconfiguration of a town in the way a new large industry or commercial center would. Data centers are ideal for small towns that need lots of additional tax revenue but don’t want to have to deal with the infrastructure costs of having a lot of new people move there at once.
What about the land use of new power and transmission capacity data centers will require?
By 2028, US data centers are projected to use around 450 TWh of energy per year (the middle of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s 325–580 TWh range, with most other major forecasts clustering nearby). Data centers run with extremely high load factors (meaning load is essentially flat and high 24/7) so 450 TWh annually works out to maybe 55 GW once you include grid losses. If served by firm power sources you’d need somewhere around 65–80 GW, or more if it’s coming from intermittent renewables.
The land footprint depends heavily on what gets built. Just getting to 450 TWh with solar would require ~2000 square miles of panels, and actually delivering that as reliable 24/7 power would require 1.5-3x as much, plus storage and batteries. So if data centers were all served by solar, they’d require maybe 2,500-5,000 additional square miles of land area.
Wind requires way less land (unless you’re worried about infrasound…) but it seems somewhat unlikely to be a big part of data center power.
Natural gas plants are very land-efficient. One large new plant generates about 1 MW per 0.05 acres, and this drops to ~0.01 acres per MW if you just look at the buildings themselves. 80 GW of new natural gas would need between 2-6 square miles of plant sites depending on how you measure. I would basically always prefer to use way more land rather than emit more, so I’m not excited about natural gas and pretty discouraged at the scale of new gas demand that data centers are adding.
Nuclear is similarly compact, at about an acre per MW for the plant. I’d be much more excited about nuclear power serving data centers, but that seems unlikely in the short term.
So there’s a large range for a reasonable estimate for the additional power-generation land footprint of data centers. It could maybe be anywhere from 50 to 1,000 square miles. This is significant but doesn’t dramatically change the picture. Adding it to the ~1,400 square miles of data center land for 2028 brings us to a maximum of 2,400 square miles. Definitely not nothing! But this means that all data centers, the land around them, and the power plants serving them would rise to collectively be at most 5% of the land used for ethanol, and roughly 0.08% of the contiguous US.
Transmission is harder to estimate, and it has the one land-use problem I think is real: utilities using eminent domain to route new lines through people’s property. I do expect serious conflicts here. But transmission is also where data centers are most plausibly positive-sum. The green energy transition already requires roughly doubling US high-voltage transmission capacity by 2050. Data center demand mostly accelerates a buildout that had to happen anyway, and a line built to serve a data center cluster also moves clean power to everyone else on it. The eminent domain cost is real and serious, but it probably has to happen anyway. Farmers in other countries are way more likely to be seriously harmed by climate change, the green energy transition is necessary to fight it, and ultimately we need to pull a few eminent domain levers. The net positive effects of data centers forcing the build of way more high energy transmission lines will outweigh the negatives, even though here I think the negatives are very real.
We have way too much farmland
Farmers have the same combination of virtues and vices as the rest of us. But I think that farmers (like any profession with a big positive halo) benefit a lot from popular narratives to the point that they can get away with more environmental and economic harms, because the halo makes it more difficult to regulate and criticize them. By the end of this section, I’d like you to share my intuition that it’s pretty normal and fine for farmers to sell their land to data centers (or solar power plants) if that’s what they want to do. These are two private actors making an economic decision that might make sense for both of them. There isn’t some deep evil happening when farmer land is converted to a data center. Farming needs to be understood as one industry among many, that we can criticize or praise like any other industry, and that shouldn’t get special treatment or handouts because of the inherent virtue of toiling in the soil.
Question farmers
Once you begin writing about any environmental issue, especially water, you quickly discover that farmers occupy a special place in American discourse where both the right and left are incapable of ever criticizing them, because “they grow our food.” People have a very simplistic idea of the inherent virtue of farming compared to many other professions. This is how you get viral clips of local farmers “bravely” saying no to a data center company politely offering to buy their land for 10x what it’s worth, and reactions like this when you politely point out this is a little overblown:
Cultural conditioning has trained us to see the good rooted people standing up to the far-off unrooted elites as always in the right. You can sometimes sneak in criticisms of farmers by referring to them as “big ag,” but this term ignores small farmers, who are not without fault.
I was recently very happy to see Tomi Lahren come out strong against the horrific “Save Our Bacon” act. It’s nice to see animal welfare becoming depolarized. But even here she had to do a dance and imply that it’s not the small farmers who are at fault, it’s the Chinese:
In reality, pig welfare on small American-owned farms is often just as bad as on large ones.
Once you pick up on the basic fact that people often find it offensive to criticize farmers at all, you start seeing it everywhere. Take this story from last year:
As I’ve talked about before, what happened here (in Morrow County Oregon) was that an Amazon data center was purchasing water from a source that was heavily polluted with nitrates, evaporating it, and sending the rest back to a wastewater treatment plant. Because the nitrates didn’t evaporate with the water, when the water was sent to the treatment plant, there was a slightly higher concentration of nitrates. This likely raised nitrate concentration in the wastewater facility by less than 1%. Amazon was using a small fraction of the region’s water, but Futurism decided to superimpose cancer cells on data center server racks to depict the problem. In my opinion, they should have superimposed cancer cells on the main industry adding the nitrates in the first place:
Farmers!
For 35 years Oregon’s government has known nitrate pollution was worsening in the Lower Umatilla Basin, the only drinking-water aquifer for Morrow and Umatilla counties, and has known the main source was irrigated agriculture. For most of that time, the government response was just suggesting “voluntary best management practices” and “stakeholder engagement.” Meaningful enforcement on the problem was limited to the Port of Morrow wastewater facility. By 2024, hundreds of domestic wells had tested above the federal nitrate limit, with some exceeding it 7x. Residents reported clusters of miscarriages, kidney failure, thyroid disease, and rare cancers. In 2022, Morrow County declared the first groundwater state of emergency in Oregon history.
Why were farmers allowed to build up nitrate pollution in the water here for 35 years?
In early 2025, state senator Khanh Pham introduced SB 747, which would have required farms over 200 acres (the largest 10%) to fill out a form telling the Oregon Department of Ag how much fertilizer they used, the kind, and the crop it was used for. The bill imposed no limits on fertilizer use. It did authorize civil penalties up to $10,000, but only for failing to file the form, or for being judged by ODA, after the fact, to be over-applying based on the reported data. Pham told the committee that “Senate Bill 747 does not impose restrictions. It simply collects data so agencies can provide better technical support, improve efficiency and prevent fertilizer waste.”
About 75% of the testimony for the bill was opposed. The Farm Bureau called it a “fishing expedition” that turned family farmers into “boogeymen.” One rep told the committee that 96% of Oregon’s farms are “family-owned and struggling.” “Family-owned” is basically meaningless, it means that any family, no matter how rich, owns the farm together. Walmart is a “family-owned” business. Farming families have slightly higher median incomes and way higher median wealth than Americans overall.
Another complained the bill “arbitrarily targeted” large farms while ignoring “municipalities and urban homeowners,” even though in the Lower Umatilla Basin specifically, agriculture and CAFOs together caused over 80% of the nitrate pollution. The farm coalition’s position was that being asked to share this very simple information on dangerous pollutants would be a ruinous burden.
Rep. Bobby Levy was the most prominent voice opposing the bill. Her family’s farming business, Windy River, is inside Morrow County and the polluted aquifer the bill was meant to protect. She told the Senate committee that “making the suggestion that over application of fertilizer is widespread is both inaccurate and unfair.” The committee declined to schedule a work session before the deadline, and the bill quietly died without a vote.
A month after Levy’s testimony, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued a citation identifying the Levy family farm as having over-applied fertilizer on its own corn fields throughout 2023, polluting the same aquifer the bill was meant to protect.
This all happened under a Democratic trifecta and while the Morrow water crisis was on the front pages of Oregon newspapers. The reason this happened is that you basically cannot say “small farmers are part of the problem” in American politics and expect to keep your job. At best, you can blame “big ag,” or maybe China, but the politics of farming is so crazy that they’re a permanent third rail politicians can’t touch or regulate, even as they poison a local community. For any other industry, this behavior would have been obviously crazy, and every other industry has regulations on how much it can pollute water. But farmers are organized, numerous, and have silly folk theories about the inherent virtue of growing food on their side.
Finally, in March 2026, the Oregon Department of Agriculture adopted the first ever mandatory nitrate management rules for the area. Even this only applies, to start, to farms over 1,000 acres, who don’t have to submit plans until May 2027. Farms between 500 and 1,000 acres will be phased in by May 2028, and smaller farms aren’t required to submit plans at all, only to keep records. ODA only has one staffer to oversee the whole basin and will audit “as agency capacity allows.” The data center here served as a useful if unintentional scapegoat to distract from the people directly adding the dangerous pollutants to the water.
About 1.5% of the contiguous United States is used for a farmer handout: ethanol
Every year, the federal government forces oil refiners to blend 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol into America’s gasoline supply. This uses about 40% of all American corn. This is mandated by the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), and was sold as a policy to help address climate change.
However, every single argument for mandating corn ethanol is terrible, and the only reason it survives is that politicians cannot question farmers.
The ethanol mandate was originally presented in 2007 as a path to energy independence and lower greenhouse gas emissions. Both arguments kind of sort of made sense then. Oil prices were high and the US was dependent on Saudi Arabia for petroleum. Not good! The lifecycle emissions of ethanol looked like it might reduce emissions if it replaced a portion of normal gasoline. There were some other interesting arguments about how at the time ethanol would reduce NOx pollution emissions or sequester carbon.
But none of this is true now. Since the shale revolution, the US is now a net petroleum exporter. Studies now find that corn ethanol’s carbon intensity is at best roughly comparable to gasoline, and probably about 24% higher once you account for land-use change, nitrous oxide from fertilizer, and the conversion of grassland back into corn fields.
Because ethanol’s made of corn, it also has a very high water cost. Corn used for ethanol is responsible for about 1.5-2 trillion gallons of withdrawals per year from aquifers and lakes, this is ignoring any rainwater it might use. That’s 4% of all water withdrawn for US irrigated agriculture, for a stupid bad mandated product. I can’t help but add that this is about 40 times as much water as all the thousands of American data centers are forecast to consume onsite in 2028. Ethanol is in general more expensive than gasoline if you measure it by its combustion energy content per dollar. So on top of everything ethanol also increases gas prices.
But what’s most shocking to me about ethanol is its land use. About 1.5% of the contiguous United States is used to grow corn for ethanol.
Corn farms for ethanol specifically take up half as much space as all urban housing and commercial land.
So why do we have this mandate? The only people who benefit are corn farmers, ethanol producers, and fertilizer and equipment providers.
Like most bad laws, the people who benefit are concentrated and organized, and the people who are harmed are scattered and unorganized. Every American pays a tiny bit more for gas, the Gulf of Mexico absorbs more fertilizer runoff than it otherwise would, the climate as a whole has a little more CO2, aquifers are drained faster, but these harms are spread so thin across so many people that we don’t notice or get organized. In comparison, farmers notice what’s happening. They organize to keep the mandate, and no one bothers to oppose them, because it’s so politically toxic to criticize farmers.
Another thing adding to the problem is that rural Midwestern communities are amplified in American politics by the electoral college and presidential primaries, and the Senate’s overweighting of low-population states. There’s a strong bipartisan voting bloc in midwestern politics that treats the ethanol mandate as a third rail that politicians absolutely cannot touch.
So we’re stuck forcing oil companies to pay to support 1.5% of the contiguous United States being used for a stupid product no one wants.
When you see people talking about how any business, be it a data center or a solar farm or anything else, is “taking away our farmland” and that “soon we won’t have any left,” consider that farmers currently have an area the size of New York State, as large as half of all American urban areas (including suburbs) put together, specially dedicated to growing a product oil companies are forced by the government to buy that makes our gas more expensive and emit more with zero benefit to anyone outside the farmers themselves. In an ideal world, farmers would lose the surface area of New York State to companies who would make better use of it, or even just shut down and be replaced with nothing so that we stopped wasting 4% of our agricultural water on a product no one wants that makes our lives and the climate worse.
All American data centers collectively in 2030 will, including all the land around them, use about this much land compared to ethanol:
Converting all the land used by ethanol in the US to utility-scale solar farms would generate roughly 11,000 terawatt-hours of electricity per year, about 2.5 to 3 times all the electricity the United States currently uses, or roughly 35% of total world electricity generation.2 Consider this the next time you see news stories of corn farmers getting mad that their land is being bought by solar plants.
As a vegan, I do also have to highlight one other major land user:
We use more land to grow food to feed the animals we eat than the land we use to grow plants that we eat directly. If all Americans went vegan, agricultural land use would drop by roughly 70–75%, freeing up something like 700 million acres, an area larger than the entire Eastern United States. I’m doing my part to reduce unnecessary land use, are you?
We have way too much land dedicated to farming.
Addressing a few other defenses of ethanol
I heard from a few people that ethanol is actually good because despite all its negatives, it reduces NOx emissions from gas, a harmful air pollutant. But this seems to no longer be true. Every US gas car built after 2017 has a catalytic converter that removes NOx from the exhaust down to very low levels no matter what fuel you burn, so whatever small NOx benefit ethanol gives during combustion gets erased. A 2022 California study on 20 cars found no meaningful NOx difference between regular E10 gas and higher-ethanol gas, and a 2025 UC Riverside study found the same.
It might actually be worse. The EPA now predicts ethanol blending raises NOx, smog-forming VOCs, and fine particulates compared to ethanol-free gas, because ethanol makes gasoline evaporate more easily. And for small engines that don't have catalytic converters, like mowers, leaf blowers, or generators, the Department of Energy found ethanol blends raise NOx by 50–75%.
Some people bring up that fossil fuels also use water to extract. That’s true, but ethanol uses way more water per unit.
A lot of people are really bad at thinking about farms in a marginal rather than an absolute way
When a data center or solar plant replaces a farm, the public conversation often turns to which product is more valuable in total. Would we rather have food, or silly computers? People will say things like “We can’t eat AI.” This is obviously ridiculous, because the question is never “should we replace all farms with data centers?” It’s always “Should we replace one specific farm with a data center?” Because we farm way more than we need, and data centers are so efficient with their land use and in so much demand, the answer is often yes. Because we have way too much farmland, I would support replacing many corn or alfalfa (water-hungry and used mainly for animal feed) farms with nothing, never mind another building.
People sometimes bring up soil quality and “prime farmland” as if it were sacred. Prime farmland in the USDA sense is a soil classification that identifies land that could grow crops well. 23% of the non-federal open land in the continental United States qualified as prime farmland. We do not need to make sure that every last piece of prime farmland is actually farmed. We are not going to run out, and shouldn’t turn all of it into farms right now.
It’s true that we can’t eat data centers, but we also can’t eat the corn grown on the New York State-sized chunk of land used for ethanol. The relevant question is always “Is this specific piece of land better used as a farm or a data center?” rather than “Should all farms be replaced with data centers?” This way of thinking would justify tearing down all our cities and public infrastructure, because we don’t need anything else as much as food.
What about the effects of climate change on farmable land?
Maybe this is all true now, but we may need to worry a lot more about farmland as climate change worsens, right?
Under most mainstream forecasts, the US ends 2100 with roughly the same or modestly expanded total climatically suitable cropland area, but with the productive zone shifted 100 to 300 miles north of where it sits today. This is still going to be wildly disruptive, because this will reshuffle what can be grown where, but on net the US will have the same or more total farmable land. The issue is going to be what can be grown where, not total access to farmland.
There’s a viral talking point that the corn belt in the upper midwest will become unsuitable for corn by 2100. We’re not actually sure if this is true, because corn varieties have been continuously rebred for changing conditions for the last century. The corn grown in Iowa today is not the corn grown in Iowa in 1925, and that wasn’t the same corn grown in 1850. By 2100, after 74 more years of adaptation, the idea that Iowa farmers will not be able to grow corn seems unlikely. The Corn Belt-collapse literature mostly assumes static management. I’m pretty skeptical on this.
Climate change will create lots of other problems for US crops. Higher levels of CO2 in the air reduces the nutritional value of grain crops, so we’ll need to grow more food to get the same nutritional value. Water might become a much more serious issue, and if the median climate forecasts are even a little off, a lot of formerly irrigated farmland won’t be useable because the water will be gone. This is a serious concern, but it’s mainly about water rather than raw access to land.
I think the most serious response you could give here is that we’ll need more farmable land to feed the global population stuck with way less farmable land. That’s fair, but the clearest way to clear out land for this is to join me and others in our quest to completely end industrial animal agriculture. Buildings that will collectively take up under 100 square miles in the US won’t ruin farmable land.
More examples of the goofy ways our politics and land use is warped by farmers
There’s too many other ways farmers’ disproportionate political power makes land use and policy goofy to keep writing about here. For more, you should look into ag-gag laws, the decline of the Ogallala Aquifer, use-it-or-lose-it water rights, the Conservation Reserve Program which pays farmers roughly $2 billion in federal money per year to not farm about 25 million acres of land (another hint that we have too much farmland), and the “family-farmer” myth (discussed a bit above) which very wealthy farming families use to garner sympathy. And on top of this, the unimaginably huge moral catastrophe of industrial animal agriculture. For a deep dive on the weird world of farm economics I’d recommend this podcast series from the Agricultural Economics Institute.
Some bad recent articles on data center land use
“Farmer Hailed as Hero for Rejecting Huge Payment to Turn His Land Into a Giant Data Center”
The immense hype surrounding AI has caused enormous data centers to crop up across the country, triggering significant opposition. It’s not just the loss of land: enormous power needs are pushing the grid into meltdown and driving up local electricity prices, catching the attention of politicians and their irate constituents.
idk I think it’s more than hype.
One 86-year-old farmer in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, has heard enough. As local Fox affiliate WPMT reports, Mervin Raudabaugh, who has farmed the surrounding land for more than 60 years, turned down more than $15 million from data center developers in a package deal that involved three neighboring property owners as well.
The farmer was offered $60,000 per acre to build a data center on his property. But giving up his family legacy wasn’t in the cards for him.
“I was not interested in destroying my farms,” he told WPMT. “That was the bottom line. It really wasn’t so much the economic end of it. I just didn’t want to see these two farms destroyed.”
Instead, he sold the development rights in December for just under $2 million to a conservation trust, taking a significant loss but guaranteeing that it would stay farmland in perpetuity.
This guy turned down $58,000,000 to ensure that America continues to have way more farmland than we actually need.
Users on social media called him a “legend,” and argued he had “more integrity than the whole government.”
“Now that is a real hero in these gutless times!” another user tweeted.
“$15M is huge, but clean water, quiet land, and legacy don’t have a price tag,” another user argued.
Data centers don’t really pollute water anywhere.
The sheer amount of land being earmarked to construct enormous energy and water-sucking data centers is remarkable. A data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is set to take up 600 acres, which could cost local residents their land, as ABC News reported this week. Another octogenarian farmer, the 83-year-old Tom Uttech, who has lived on his 52-acre Wisconsin property for almost 40 years, told the broadcaster that he “couldn’t believe” that a local utility company was looking to build “power lines that are 300 or something feet tall, taller than apparently the Statue of Liberty,” through his land to power the data center.
“Cost residents their land” meaning “Could mean residents are paid way more than what their land is worth if they choose to accept the deal.” 600 acres is about a square mile. Each of these is a square mile:
A private company purchasing a single square mile farm in a rural area wouldn’t make headlines. But data centers are seen as weird and not traditional, and so they get way more scrutiny. We would need to build 50,000 data centers at this size to use as much land as ethanol corn.
“It breaks my heart to think of what’s going to take place here, because only the land that’s preserved here is going to be here,” Raudabaugh told WPMT. “The rest of every square inch is going to get built on. The American farm family is definitely in trouble.”
This is an insane hyperbolic thing to say. We have so so so much farmland, way more than we need. Every square inch is not going to get built on, and the average American farm family is incredibly well-off and coasting off of powerful political allegiances and the confused goodwill of populists.
This same story was reported on in Fortune and Newsweek.
A data center using as much land as 51 Walmarts
The town didn’t “plan” the data centers, they approved a private company to purchase land. This is a common weird framing in the data center discourse. People will often talk as if data centers are this collective decision we’re all making. In reality, private companies buy land, power, and water from towns and utilities like other companies.
This town is 17 square miles. The article says the data centers would together take up 14% of the town’s land, so ~2.4 square miles.
This is the town of Archibald PA that the article’s about:
It’s in a pretty rural area:
These are the sites where the data centers have been proposed:
If you found out that a small town like this were getting a college or farm in the same area, how would you react? Would this be an unacceptable imposition on the locals? The college would radically change the general culture and infrastructure needs of the town, whereas the data centers just hum in the background.
There are definitely serious issues the locals bring up in the article (electricity costs, air pollution, noise) but the land use framing makes no sense to me. Archbald is in a pretty rural area with tons of wide open land. Purchasing 14% of a small town’s land on its own doesn’t seem newsworthy.
“This Land is Their Land”
The title image is already promising:
The subtitle is “Farmers are fighting AI companies offering fortunes to build data centers on their land. Can they withstand the pressure — and live to farm another day?”
Farmers are always framed as the good guys. Question this.
“Life-changing money.” That’s how Wendy Reigel describes the windfall developers are offering farmers for their land, potential sites for hyperscale data centers to meet AI’s massive processing needs. Reigel is a grassroots anti-data-center activist who successfully fought the building of a center just 300 feet from her house in Chesterton, Indiana; she now helps other communities mobilize against data center incursions. She can only make an educated guess as to how much money is on offer — almost everything about these facilities is shrouded in secrecy.
“$20,000 an acre would be low-balling it,” Reigel said. “$40,000 would be maybe a starting point. And I’ve heard as high as $90,000.”
This doesn’t exactly sound nefarious. They’re offering crazy amounts of money for people’s land. Would it be better if they offered less?
And with this wind beneath their sails, AI-giddy companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have embarked on a national land grab.
The new land grab here being in total about 2 times as much land as we use to grow Christmas trees by 2030.
Some farmers are loath to condemn fellow farmers who sell their land for this purpose. They don’t begrudge life-changing money to anyone who’s contended with their industry’s often brutal fiscal realities, although a farmer in Michigan who sold his land for an “astronomical” sum — in the interest of what he called progress — says his neighbors don’t wave at him anymore. With or without the animus, farmers who opt not to sell are left to contend with the potential destruction of their operations and their lives. “It ruins all our little farms around here that we worked all our lives on,” a couple in Coweta, Oklahoma, told the local news.
I think all farmers should be loathe to condemn other people for making private financial decisions that work out well for them if they don’t harm other people. The question is will the data centers actually harm the nearby farmers?
There are data centers popping up almost everywhere, from Oregon and Nevada to Georgia and Virginia. (Loudon County is our country’s “data center alley.”) But Indiana has become an especial target for hyperscale facilities, of which there are an estimated 1,130 globally; since Indiana produces a lot of corn, soy, and hogs, it’s also illustrative of the challenges that farmers in particular are up against.
43% of Indiana's corn crop went into ethanol production in 2024, and ~95% of Indiana hogs are in factory farm conditions. Neither inspires sympathy from me.
“That hurts us, because they’re paying a higher price than market value for the land; that drives property values up, then farmers are struggling to pay their taxes,” Blalock said. That price is also “completely out of reach” for any farmers starting out or looking to expand their operations. When data centers are willing to quadruple or quintuple an already-inflated price, affordability for farmers goes up in smoke.
Okay, well we have one answer to how data centers are “harming” farmers. They’re making the farmers’ land so valuable that property taxes go up.
For any farmer who actually owns the land they farm (which most do), rising land values are a massively good outcome. Land is by far the largest asset on most farms’ balance sheets (the article will go on to note this). They can borrow against it, sell and retire on it, or pass it to their kids. The article is asking us to feel sorry for farmers because someone is making their land massively more valuable. I need anyone reading this to ask: if it’s bad for the data center to raise farmer land values, doesn’t that mean it would be good for it to lower their land values? But if a data center moved in and made everyone’s farmland way less valuable, I think we’d also hear lots of negative stories about how it harmed a community, and there I’d take it more seriously.
The weirdest thing about all of this is that Indiana’s agricultural land tax is not supposed to be based simply on speculative industrial value. The state says agricultural land value is based on productive capacity, regardless of the land’s potential or highest and best use, and the 2026 agricultural base rate is listed at $2,120 per acre. So I’m not actually sure if rising land value will even raise taxes here.
Morgan Butler is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, who helped the tobacco- and dairy-producing community of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, fight off a 1,000-acre AI facility. He said developers are drawn to farmland because “They see a huge area. In their eyes there’s nothing on it, nothing particularly valuable, there aren’t that many residents so hopefully they won’t kick up a firestorm of public opposition.”
What needs opposing here? A data center drops in and offers so much money that it inadvertently makes all the land value around it go way up and all the farmers who didn’t interact with it got richer? What?
That rural “nothingness,” though, is precisely what community members opposed to data centers hope to preserve. One farmer in Kentucky turned down an $8 million offer for his land, citing his family’s sentimental ties to it and the community’s fondness for the landscape as it is. However, one bitter truth for farmers is that much of their net worth can be tied up in their land; retirement might necessitate selling property because they have few or no other assets, making a generous offer for acreage hard to refuse.
Okay, so far this article’s been implying that it’s a massive crime that the data centers are raising farmer land values so much, and now it adds that much of an average farmer’s net worth is tied up in their land. This implies that the data centers are doing farmers a massive favor by increasing so much of their total net worth? But the article never acknowledges this contradiction. In fact, a pull quote appears right below that makes this contrast more obvious:
A hyperscale data center can use upwards of 8 million gallons of water per year, mostly for cooling its servers. “We don’t have the water supply” to meet those needs, said farmer Bart Snyder. Snyder lives in Wolcott, an ag-centric town 135 miles northwest of Henry County, where Amazon is scouting a 330-acre facility 1,000 feet from one of his farm properties. He’s suing his town’s commissioner and redevelopment committee members (all of whom signed NDAs) for approving a farm-to-industrial land rezoning on behalf of that facility. “To consume that much water would absolutely devastate our row crops” and potentially create a deficit for Snyder’s 30 beef calves, which each drink 15 gallons of water daily. “People are literally scared to death,” he said.
Blalock is concerned that if a data center is approved in her county, it could deplete the local aquifer, causing neighbors’ wells to run dry and preventing her family from ever drilling one of their own for their cattle. She said that would put them out of business and leave their land valueless. “No one has answers for us about, what’s our backup plan? What if people lose water? You can take your family to go stay in a hotel but it’s not like doggy daycare; you can’t show up with 50 head of cattle.” And she worries: “Are we going to be the generation that loses the farm?”
The data center seems unlikely to do this.
Wolcott is in White County, Indiana. Irrigation on corn typically runs 6–10 inches per season. 8,695 irrigated acres at ~8 inches of supplemental irrigation consume roughly 1.9 billion gallons per year. The 8 million-gallon data center is 0.4% of that. This data center is using as much water as a local 35 acre irrigated farm. If one additional 35 acre farm appeared, I don’t think the farmers would be talking this way.
The rest of the article has legit worries about pollution and electricity prices. It also has an interesting concern about infrasound I hadn’t addressed last time: its effect on animals. I think that if animals can detect infrasound because they evolved to hear different frequencies than us, it makes complete sense that infrasound could be harmful to them. I will circle back on this once I know more about infrasound and animals.
This is a back-of-envelope estimate. Nobody tracks total US data center parcel acreage directly. As of late 2025, Cushman & Wakefield reports the Americas hosts 43.4 GW of operational data center capacity, with 93.6% in the US (so ~40 GW US operational), plus 25.3 GW under construction. Capacity forecasts for 2030 cluster around a 2.5–3.5× expansion: McKinsey projects US data center power demand to rise from 25 GW in 2024 to over 80 GW by 2030, S&P Global’s 451 Research projects 134 GW by 2030, and Bain forecasts global capacity reaching 163 GW (the US is roughly 80% of the Americas total). Skeptics including Grid Strategies argue these are inflated by speculative projects and that ~65 GW of additional load is more realistic. Assuming a central case of ~85 GW US operational by 2030. Cushman & Wakefield’s 2025 Data Center Development Cost Guide reports the average data center parcel acquired in 2024 was 224 acres — a 144% increase since 2022, with hyperscalers routinely buying 1,000+ acre sites for phased buildout (Meta’s 4-million-square-foot Louisiana campus sits on 2,250 acres for ~2 GW). Combining current operational acreage (~300,000 acres across roughly 4,000 facilities, most of which are small legacy colocation on tiny urban parcels) with new hyperscale buildout at ~1,500–3,000 acres per new GW gives a total in the 600,000–1,000,000 acre range, roughly 1,400 square miles at the central estimate, or about the area of Rhode Island.
Building-footprint math: existing US data center floor space is roughly 300–400 million sq ft, or ~11–14 sq mi. By 2030, capacity is projected to roughly triple (from ~25 GW today to ~85 GW central case), but power density is rising sharply at the same time — AI racks now run 40–60 kW vs. legacy racks at 10–14 kW, so new facilities pack much more compute into the same square footage. Assuming new-build density runs 1.5–2× legacy stock, ~85 GW × ~7,000–9,000 sq ft per MW (blended legacy + AI-dense) gives roughly 600–765 million sq ft, or ~22–27 sq mi. 25 sq mi is in the middle.
Ethanol corn occupies ~30 million acres (USDA ERS; about 1.5% of contiguous US land per Bloomberg US Land Use). Utility-scale solar in the US generates ~370–470 MWh per acre per year (LBNL 2021 PV Land Requirements, Figure 8 median energy density). 30 million acres × ~400 MWh/acre/yr ≈ 12,000 TWh/yr, rounded to ~11,000 TWh. US electricity generation in 2024 was ~4,200 TWh (EIA Monthly Energy Review), so 11,000 TWh ≈ 2.6x. Global generation is ~30,000 TWh (Ember Yearly Electricity Data), so 11,000 TWh ≈ 37%.