Data centers are popping up all over the world at stunning speed. But not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat.
Countries have long housed power-hungry data centers—the facilities packed with computing infrastructure that underpins the internet as we know it. But their numbers have exploded amid the global artificial intelligence race, which requires massive computing power. That has led to the spread of even bigger data centers around the world, including the more controversial “hyperscale” facilities used by tech giants.
Last year, data centers consumed more electricity than all but 10 countries, according to a United Nations University report, with even more to come. If data centers were their own country, BloombergNEF forecasted that they are set to gobble up so much energy by 2035 that they could rank among the top 5 countries in terms of electricity use.
While governments have courted data centers due to their potential economic benefits, many local communities have resisted their development over concerns about the impact on jobs, energy bills, water usage, and the environment. From Chile to Scotland to Australia, opposition to the massive facilities has erupted around the entire world.
“It’s a complicated moment,” said Boris Gamazaychikov, co-founder of the Sustainable AI Group, a research firm that focuses on AI’s environmental impacts. “The space is really polarized.”
As data centers proliferate, Foreign Policy looked at what their global footprint looks like right now and how it might evolve in the coming years.
A technician works at an Amazon Web Services data center in New Carlisle, Indiana, on Oct. 2, 2025. Noah Berger/Getty Images via Amazon Web Services
To grasp the full scale and scope of these facilities’ global footprint, it’s important to first establish that it’s only the beginning of the boom. The world is still in the early stages of deploying data centers and AI, and significant growth is expected, according to Ashish Sethia, the global head of commodities at BloombergNEF.
Here is what we know: In 2024, data centers accounted for about 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption. But that share is set to more than double by 2030—which means that data centers would consume as much electricity as Japan does today, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).
For regions with big clusters of data centers, demand can be far more overwhelming. In some places, the facilities can account for as much as 25 or 30 percent of total electricity consumption—posing a big challenge for the local grid, said Siddharth Singh, an analyst at the IEA. “These data centers are coming up very, very quickly,” he said.
About three quarters of the world’s data center capacity is concentrated in just three regions: the United States, China, and Western Europe, Singh said.
The United States is the clear leader in the charge. With U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambitions of AI supremacy, more than 1,500 data centers are now in development, adding to the 3,000 that are already operational across the country. That expansion has been largely powered by natural gas: To secure more energy, and fast, many tech giants have turned away from the electric grid and instead resorted to building their own on-site natural gas plants.
Yet the Trump administration’s push for a rapid data center buildout has faced fierce bipartisan backlash, and at least 15 states have weighed moratoriums. Trump has dismissed data center critics and said that they are playing into the interests of Beijing.
Read More
-
High-angle aerial view of a massive industrial complex surrounded by wide dirt fields and flat countryside. The facility consists of numerous long, flat-roofed rectangular buildings arranged in orderly clusters, with paved roads, parking lots, and long rows of solar panels or covered structures running alongside them. Active construction areas with exposed reddish-brown soil stretch out adjacent to the developed campus under a clear sky. High-angle aerial view of a massive industrial complex surrounded by wide dirt fields and flat countryside. The facility consists of numerous long, flat-roofed rectangular buildings arranged in orderly clusters, with paved roads, parking lots, and long rows of solar panels or covered structures running alongside them. Active construction areas with exposed reddish-brown soil stretch out adjacent to the developed campus under a clear sky. The Real Footprint of Trump’s Data Center Boom
What the sprawling buildout means for energy, water, and land.
-
A narrow high-rise building is seen from below as it looms up into a dark, cloudy sky. Only one of the many windows is lit up. A narrow high-rise building is seen from below as it looms up into a dark, cloudy sky. Only one of the many windows is lit up. Data Centers in the Crosshairs
Why digital connectivity has become the new front in modern warfare.
Chinese President Xi Jinping “will take every data center that we don’t want,” Trump told reporters last month. “He would love to have every single one, because you know why? They’re smart.”
China is indeed going all-in on data center construction in its bid for AI dominance, although it still lags behind the United States. Beijing’s operational data center computing capacity is still less than half of Washington’s, according to SemiAnalysis, a research firm.
But Beijing has some key advantages in ensuring a swift expansion. Unlike the United States, public pushback is rare, and Chinese companies can build quickly. The country also has cheap land and abundant energy, with coal currently fueling the bulk of the country’s data center electricity supply, according to the IEA.
The bigger constraints that Beijing faces are accessing advanced chips and the high-end IT equipment going into data centers, said Thomas Spencer, an analyst at the IEA. (U.S. export bans have limited Beijing’s access to powerful AI chips.)
Western Europe, Japan, and South Korea also have sizable data center markets. But those booms have come with their own strains: Many of these advanced economies are grappling with stagnant electricity demand and older electricity networks, and community pushback has been forceful.
Ireland, for example, developed so many data centers that they sucked up more energy than all the country’s urban homes combined—ultimately forcing the government to bar new data center construction. And across Europe, public backlash has delayed or canceled roughly $42 billion in data center investments.
“There’s a combination of social pushback and infrastructural bottlenecks, which holds across developed markets as a sort of general trend,” Spencer said.
An aerial photo shows the construction site of Google’s AI and data center hub in Tarluvada, India, on Sept. 7. AFP via Getty Images
With so much of the world’s data center capacity concentrated in just a handful of countries, emerging market economies are eager to attract data centers and see their own ecosystems grow.
It’s not all about AI, either; these data centers include facilities that also service IT demand more broadly, encompassing everything from email to video streaming, Singh said. About half of all internet users are currently in regions that have less than 10 percent of global data center capacity, he added.
“If the future of the global economy is going to be information technology, they don’t want to lose out on another revolution of sorts,” Singh said.
They also have the added advantage of building faster and cheaper. In countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, it costs much less to build data centers and the related power infrastructure than it does in the United States, Sethia said.
“You get a better bang for your buck if you deploy the same dollars in some of these emerging markets,” he said.
As the data center boom takes off, developers are increasingly eyeing attractive new markets.
In a recent ranking of the friendliest data center markets in the world, BloombergNEF highlighted Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, Canada, and France as some of the top markets. The score was calculated based on their energy availability, land permitting, tax policy, fiber connectivity, and existing data center capacity.
One big question will be how local communities respond. Take India, which is seeing its own boom and has ramped up its efforts to woo companies—most recently unveiling a two-decade tax holiday to overseas firms operating data centers in the country. New Delhi has also touted a $15 billion data center project by Google.
-
A person looking down at a mobile phone walks past a large black banner that displays a white handprint and bold text reading “STOP DATA CENTERS”. - A person walks past a banner during the People’s Convention on AI Data Centers event in Visakhapatnam, India, on Sept. 6. Idrees Mohammed/AFP via Getty Images
-
A figure dressed in black paints graffiti across a long metal barrier, with green smoke drifting through the scene. - A demonstrator, who is wearing a cut-out mask depicting Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, writes the word “stop” on a wall during a protest against the construction of new data centers in Rho, Italy, on Oct. 3. Piero Cruciatti/AFP via Getty Images
Yet reports suggest that local resistance is building amid concerns of the Google project’s impacts on water supplies, energy usage, and a nearby wildlife sanctuary, and the project is facing several legal challenges. As protests mounted, Indian officials have announced plans to unveil a new data center policy that will shield consumers from higher energy bills.
All that pushback, in India and beyond, will likely be instrumental in molding the future of the global sector, analysts said.
“Out of this scrutiny, a new kind of playbook can emerge, which takes into account the needs of local communities as well as infrastructure developers,” Sethia said.
Graphics by Lori Kelley and Brooks Robinson. Maxine Davey and Maya Krainc contributed graphics research.
