Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Data Centers — How Many is Enough?
Presently there are 4,235 “Data Centers” in the U.S. (Datacentermap.com) with 1,500 more under construction or in the pipeline.
According to McKinsey, the total global capacity demand (2025) is 82 gigawatts, which will grow to 219 gigawatts by 2030. Bloomberg reports that one-half of U.S. electricity demand growth in 2025 came from data centers. In Virginia, data centers consumed about 26% of all electricity in 2025 (Pew Research Center) and Virginia data centers under construction surged 80% in 2025. Where is the new electricity coming from? Globally, solar energy covered 83% of electricity demand growth in 2025 (ember-energy.com).
A medium-sized data center will use about 110 million gallons of water per year for cooling, implying a total annual water usage in the U.S. alone of about 630 billion gallons per year. For comparison, the average American household uses about 82 gallons of water per day, or about 4.19 trillion gallons of household water consumption. Thus, the water usage of data centers will equal about 15% of domestic water consumption.
As of 2025, data center vacancy rates were 1.6%. McKinsey estimates that total global data center investments will be $6.7 Trillion by 2030. By comparison, the aggregate value of all U.S. stock markets as of January 1, 2026, was $68 Trillion (Siblis Research).
Admittedly, I utilize data center space for the massive work-file storage I’ve accumulated over the decades. However, this explosive growth is linked in no small part to AI. Philosophically, we’re still working out what society and civilization will look like in an AI world. When I was a young Midshipman, the Academy added a course in computer science to the curriculum. The Lieutenant teaching it said the most outrageous thing — that eventually, there would be a computer of some form or another on board every Navy ship. We found that statement to be incredible. Now, a half century later, wars are being fought by those computers. I remember when the first personal computers were coming out — I was on Wall Street at the time. Some forward thinking stockbrokers thought these would be great to have on their desks so as to use spreadsheets to impress their clients. Most of us thought this was a waste of money. How little did we know…
With that history behind me, I skeptical that we have yet to envision the full range of AI, just as we couldn’t envision the full range of the internet, PCs, on-line commerce, Netflix (and its hundreds of competitors), Google (and “googling” things), and a myriad of other uses we have for the internet today. For example, all of the research for this post came from Google, Bing, and AI (with substantive cross-checking, by the way). It’s also not lost on me that I’ve typed this missive directly onto an on-line blog that will never see ink-to-paper.
As always, if you have any questions or comments, please e-mail me!
John A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D., MAI
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Unemployment — better, or worse?
Great article in CNN.com today about the new employment numbers, up 120,000 in the most recent report (slightly better than projected) and the unemployment rate is down to 8.6%. While the stock market reacted positively on the news, the response wasn’t overwhelming. Why? First, creating 120,000 new jobs isn’t very good — our economy really needs to be creating about 200,000+ jobs/month to sustain really healthy GDP growth. Second, the drop in unemployment was a manifestation of a large number of “employable” workers simply leaving the hunt and, for the time being, giving up. That is terrible news, in the long run, for the economy.
November jobs report: Hiring up, unemployment down – Dec. 2, 2011.
Also, the bulk of the new job creation was in retail and hospitality. Sadly, not all jobs are created equal, and while a person in a retail position is better for the economy than a person in the unemployment line, it’s still not the same as a person in science, engineering, or technology.
That same article deals with one of the big ironies of our economy — many jobs are vacant for lack of applicants, mainly in — double irony — science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). One would think that students would flock to major in those fields, and indeed about 22% of all college students start out in STEM majors. However, nationwide, the STEM majors have a huge drop-out rate, and only 14% of college students end up graduating in those fields. Columbia University, arguably one of the toughest in the nation, bucks this trend with a 96% completion rate in Engineering. Of course, Columbia does a huge vetting process — simply getting into the program is tough. However, they take a very pro-active stance at keeping students engaged and active. Student-dropouts at other schools point to lack of preparation as one of the contributors to non-completion.
Economists are nearly universal in recognizing that the biggest key to a healthy economy is education. K-12 needs to do a MUCH better job at preparing students for these technical majors, and colleges and universities need to work harder at engaging the students once they get them. These are really critical issues, particularly at this juncture, for moving our economy forward.
From a small northwestern observatory... 