Data Centers

Think about your morning routine. You check the weather on your phone. You transfer money for a bill. Your child logs into a virtual classroom. You stream a podcast on the way to work. The drivers on your route use GPS and mapping databases for navigation. A first responder across town receives a real-time alert about a developing emergency. 

Behind every one of those moments, invisible, silent, and largely taken for granted, is a data center.

Global data center capacity has more than doubled in the past decade, and demand is accelerating. Yet for many residents, local officials, and community stakeholders, these facilities remain something of a mystery: large buildings with few windows, surrounded by fences, typically at the edge of a business park or industrial corridor.

As communities across the country face decisions about growth, infrastructure investment, and economic development, data centers are increasingly part of the conversation. Understanding what they are, as well as what they contribute, are the starting points for making those decisions.

What a Data Center Actually Is

At its most basic level, a data center is a facility that houses computer servers, networking equipment, and the supporting infrastructure needed to store, process, and transmit data reliably and securely. Power systems, cooling, and physical security all work in concert to keep these facilities running around the clock.

When you send an email, stream a movie, make a purchase online, or access a cloud-based application, that action is processed through a data center. The cloud is not an abstraction. It is physical infrastructure that is strategically located, engineered for redundancy, and designed to operate continuously.

Data centers range widely in scale. Some are modest facilities serving a regional enterprise. Others are massive hyperscale campuses occupying hundreds of acres. What they share is a singular purpose: keeping the digital world running without interruption.

The Infrastructure Behind Everything You Do Today

Data centers are central to nearly every aspect of modern daily life.

Healthcare
Electronic health records, telemedicine platforms, remote patient monitoring systems, and diagnostic imaging tools all depend on secure, high-availability data infrastructure. When a physician in a rural clinic reviews a patient’s history or consults with a specialist in another city, that capability exists because data centers make it possible.

Education
The growth of online and hybrid learning has fundamentally changed how students of all ages access instruction. Digital classrooms, learning management systems, and virtual tutoring platforms all depend on the same infrastructure. For students in communities where access to in-person resources may be limited, reliable digital connectivity, underpinned by data centers, has become an educational equalizer.

Public Safety
Emergency response systems, 911 dispatch networks, traffic management platforms, and first responder communications all run on digital infrastructure. The speed and reliability of that infrastructure can have life-or-death consequences. Data centers are not peripheral to public safety; in many cases, they are central to it.

Financial Services
Online banking, digital payments, fraud detection, and e-commerce transactions are all processed through data center infrastructure. The ability to move money securely and efficiently, for individuals, small businesses, and large enterprises alike, relies on systems that operate without meaningful downtime.

Communication
Every email, video call, text message, and social media interaction passes through data center infrastructure. In an era when remote work has become a permanent feature of the economy, this infrastructure is foundational.

Entertainment and Media
Streaming services, gaming platforms, and digital content delivery are powered by vast data center networks designed to serve on-demand requests at global scale.

The bottom line: Data centers are not a luxury of the tech industry. They are infrastructure, as essential in their own way as roads, utilities, and broadband networks, supporting the systems that modern communities depend on every day.

What Data Centers Mean for Local Communities

Beyond their operational role, data centers carry meaningful implications for the communities where they are built.

Tax Revenue
Data centers are significant contributors to local tax bases. Property taxes, business taxes, and utility taxes generated by these facilities can directly support local schools, emergency services, road maintenance, parks, and community programs. In some jurisdictions, a single large data center development has meaningfully shifted a municipality’s fiscal position.

Job Creation
While data centers are not labor-intensive in the traditional sense, they do create high-quality, well-paying jobs, from facility technicians and network engineers to security professionals and operations managers. Data center construction also generates substantial employment during the development phase, and ongoing maintenance creates long-term vendor and contractor relationships with local businesses.

Infrastructure Investment
Data center development frequently catalyzes broader infrastructure improvements. Facilities require reliable, high-capacity power and robust fiber connectivity, and the investment required to deliver those utilities often benefits surrounding areas as well. Upgraded substations, expanded broadband access, and improved road infrastructure are common byproducts of large-scale data center development.

Long-Term Commitment
Unlike some forms of commercial development that may relocate as market conditions shift, data centers are long-term investments. The cost and complexity of building and operating a major data center facility creates a durable economic anchor. Communities that attract data center investment often see sustained economic activity over a period of decades.

Regional Competitiveness
In an increasingly digital economy, being positioned as a digitally connected, infrastructure-forward region matters for attracting other businesses and talent. Data center investment is often viewed as a signal of a community’s readiness to support the modern economy.

Being a Good Neighbor: Design, Sustainability, and Community Integration

No infrastructure project arrives without questions, and data centers are no exception. Communities often raise reasonable concerns about power consumption, water usage for cooling systems, visual impact on the surrounding landscape, noise from electrical and mechanical equipment, and the intensity of truck traffic during construction.

These are legitimate considerations and, increasingly, they are being addressed through thoughtful design and responsible development practices.

Modern data center facilities must be designed with neighbors in mind. Architectural screening, landscaping buffers, and sound mitigation measures are standard elements of well-designed projects. Responsible operators engage early and transparently with local officials and surrounding communities, not simply as a regulatory requirement, but as a reflection of the recognition that every data center is also a neighbor and a long-term member of the community it serves. 

That engagement is most meaningful when it reaches all affected stakeholders, reflecting a broader awareness that infrastructure siting decisions, historically, have not always distributed impacts evenly across communities. Sustainability has also become a central design priority. Many operators have made significant commitments to renewable energy sourcing, water conservation, and energy-efficient cooling technologies. The industry continues to evolve rapidly on this front, driven by both regulatory expectations and market pressure from corporate customers with their own sustainability commitments.

The quality of community integration often comes down to the people and firms involved in planning and designing a project, their experience, their values, and the care they bring to understanding the specific context of a given community.

A Conversation Worth Having… and Worth Having Well

As data demand continues to grow, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, streaming, and the expansion of connected devices, the need for data center infrastructure will only increase. Communities, planners, and elected officials will increasingly be asked to weigh in on proposals, evaluate tradeoffs, and make decisions that will shape their economic and physical landscape for a generation.

The current wave of data center growth is closely tied to the rapid expansion of AI, which requires significant computing power to train and operate. As this demand accelerates, so does the pace at which communities are asked to weigh in on new development, making informed, inclusive dialogue and attention to how impacts are distributed more important than ever.

Understanding what data centers are, how they function, and what they contribute is the starting point for those conversations. Not every project is the right fit for every location, and not every proposed development will be designed or operated to the same standard. Informed communities are better positioned to ask the right questions, evaluate proposals on their merits, and participate constructively in shaping outcomes.

Data centers don’t just appear. They are planned, designed, reviewed, and built, one facility at a time. The people and firms involved in that process make choices that affect communities for decades. Getting those choices right matters, and that starts with communities being informed enough to ask the right questions.

GBA’s Mission Critical team partners with data center owners, operators, and communities across the full facility life cycle, from site evaluation and design through commissioning and quality assurance. We help clients balance operational needs with responsible development to create projects that deliver long-term value for both businesses and the communities they serve.