This is the second in a series of articles exploring the facts behind the data center debate. Read part one here, and download our full eBook, The Truth About Data Centers, for a deeper look at the issues covered in this series.

Data centers are in the news for reasons that make a lot of people uncomfortable. New facilities are appearing in communities that weren’t expecting them. Electricity bills are rising. Questions about water use, noise, and neighborhood impact are real and deserve straight answers.

These are legitimate concerns, and DataBank is committed to addressing them directly rather than letting the debate outpace the facts.

Your Day Is Already Running on This Infrastructure

Most people think of essential infrastructure as the things they can see: power lines, water towers, roads and bridges. Data centers belong in that same category but they’re invisible by design. What powers your phone, your bank app, and your streaming service is a building full of servers running somewhere, around the clock, every day of the year.

Think about a typical day. Your alarm goes off, you check the weather, scan your email, and order coffee through an app on your way out the door. Every one of those interactions touches a data center. So does the navigation that reroutes your commute, the video call you join at the office, the prescription your pharmacy fills automatically, and the news alert that arrives while you’re making dinner.

By the time you fall asleep, you’ve touched data center infrastructure thousands of times. This is the infrastructure required for modern life as we all know it, and stepping away from it, even for a day, isn’t really an option anymore.

Download our full eBook, The Truth About Data Centers, for a deeper look at the facts behind the concerns communities are raising.

What 24 Hours Without Them Would Look Like

Data centers aren’t a new invention. They powered the early internet, enabled Web 2.0, made smartphones possible, brought streaming into living rooms, and kept businesses running when the world went remote during the pandemic. For decades, they have been the foundation beneath every major shift in how we live and work.

AI is the latest chapter in that story, accelerating demand faster than anyone anticipated, but the dependency was already there long before the first ChatGPT query was ever typed.

Consider what a single day without data centers would actually look like:

• Stock markets halt and payroll systems go offline
• At the office, shared documents are inaccessible and video calls won’t connect
• Cash becomes the only payment option, at lunch, at the gas station, everywhere
• Hospitals work from paper records and flights are grounded
• The 911 dispatch system runs on backup protocols
• Weather forecasting goes dark, and GPS navigation becomes unreliable
• Your bank balance is inaccessible, and online pharmacies can’t fill prescriptions

This list doesn’t stop there. Data centers are woven into the fabric of modern life in ways most people never have reason to consider.

None of this is speculation about what might happen someday. It reflects what modern life already depends on and why getting this right matters for everyone.

The Scale Is Hard to Overstate

The numbers behind that dependency are striking. Humanity now streams approximately 27.5 billion hours of video every day — a mind-boggling 318,000 hours per second — a figure that has nearly doubled since the pandemic. Streaming has become a daily habit for 85% of consumers. Global e-commerce totaled $6.8 trillion in 2025. Every one of those figures is growing, and the infrastructure supporting them has to grow with it.

Data centers have been absorbing that load for more than two decades. What changed recently is the arrival of AI at scale. More than one in three people across the world’s major economies now use generative AI tools regularly, and business adoption has more than doubled in two years. Every one of those interactions requires significantly more computing power than a standard search or streaming request, and all of it runs through a data center.

The demand was already substantial before AI arrived. Now it is growing faster than at any point in the history of the internet.

Growth and Responsibility Aren’t Opposites

We understand why rapid data center expansion raises questions. It’s visible, it’s fast, and it’s happening in communities already managing real pressures around energy costs and land use. Those concerns are valid, and responsible operators have an obligation to take them seriously rather than expect the public to simply accept growth as inevitable.

Understanding why the demand exists is only part of the conversation. The questions communities are raising go further, touching on electricity costs, strain on local power grids, water consumption, and the overall impact of large facilities moving into their neighborhoods. Those concerns deserve the same honest, fact-based treatment as the demand argument.

In the next article in this series, we take a closer look at one of the most frequently misunderstood pieces of that puzzle: the relationship between data centers and your electricity bill.

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