(GPB News)-Clean air advocates say unchecked growth in Georgia’s data center industry could harm public health. Especially for people in metro Atlanta where air quality has worsened.
More than 4% of all electricity used nationwide powers data centers, according to the Pew Research Center, and AI-optimized hyperscale data centers use servers equipped with powerful computer chips that can perform trillions of mathematical calculations per second and require two to four times as many watts to run than their traditional counterparts.
Five data center projects are ongoing, and more are proposed — all in the city of South Fulton. They are being built in anticipation of growth in artificial intelligence,…