Tag: data centers

By Zachery Suaco, Communications and Social Media Intern at the Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN)

I grew up knowing what climate disaster looked like before I had a word for it. My family is Filipino, and Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 was not a news story for us. It consisted of phone calls we were afraid to answer. It was waiting to hear if people we loved were okay. I was in elementary school, and I already understood that the climate was not some future problem, but rather something that had already taken things from people I knew.

That understanding is what led me into climate advocacy. It felt like the most honest thing I could do with the anger and frustration I had been carrying. And I genuinely believed that my generation, Gen Z, was different. That we had grown up with enough awareness to actually do something about it.

But what I did not expect was to look at my utility bill and find out that I was part of the problem in a way I had never considered.

Data centers, part of the physical infrastructure behind every AI tool my generation uses constantly, are one of the biggest drivers of energy demand in the DMV right now. Virginia alone has over 600 data centers, more than any other state in the country, and those data centers already consume more than a quarter of the Commonwealth’s entire electricity supply. That’s not a national statistic spread thin across the country. That’s our grid, and our overall region. And when demand that big gets added to a system, the costs cannot be absorbed quickly or painlessly.

Virginia residents have already seen their monthly bills go up $11.24 in 2026 partly because of the infrastructure being built to support that demand. And regulators had to create an entirely separate rate class just for data center customers to stop the cost-shifting from getting worse. That’s how significant the footprint has gotten.

Here’s the part that is hardest to accept. Gen Z did not build these data centers. But we are the first generation to normalize using AI for everything — from generating images to answering questions we could have Googled to having full conversations with chatbots. And that usage has a physical cost that most of us have never once thought about. Every 20 to 50 queries to a large language model uses roughly 500 milliliters of water, about the size of a standard plastic water bottle, just for cooling the servers and powering the grid that runs them. And by 2028, the onslaught of AI data centers worldwide is projected to consume over a trillion liters of water annually. That’s eleven times what all data centers used just a year ago.

We are the generation that grew up going to climate strikes. But we are also the generation that made ChatGPT the fastest-growing consumer product in history. Those two things are in real tension, and I don’t think we talk about it enough.

I am not saying AI is irredeemably bad or that we need to stop using it. That is not a realistic or even useful approach. But I do think my generation has been sold a version of climate consciousness that is more about identity than behavior. We recycle, we carry reusable bags, we post in opposition to fossil fuel companies on platforms that run on fossil-fuel-powered infrastructure. And we have mostly gotten a pass on interrogating the digital habits that are now reshaping energy grids in our own backyard.

The good news is that there is already pushback happening. In Virginia alone, 42 community groups and more than 12,000 people have signed petitions pushing back against unchecked data center expansion. People are paying attention. The question is whether my generation is going to show up to that fight the same way we showed up to the ones that felt easier.

Growing up Filipino and watching what Haiyan did taught me that climate change does not wait for people to feel ready. It just arrives, and it arrives when we least expect it. And the least we can do is be honest about where our own consumption fits into that picture, and then actually do something about it. That’s why I’m calling on my peers to show up to local hearings and demand a pause on new energy and water-guzzling data centers. Until we have the right solutions, “build first, figure it out later” is not an option.