EUGENE, Ore. – Environmental groups are raising concerns about the possibility of a larger data center coming to Eugene as demand for artificial intelligence grows.
At least three micro data centers are already operating within Eugene, including one within the U.S. Bank building and another at a colocation facility on Willamette Street. While these smaller facilities have existed for decades, environmental groups say they’re increasingly focused on the health and environmental impacts of much larger data centers, which are rapidly growing in size across the country.
“Cloud-based storage has been around for quite a while. Their footprint is much smaller,” said Jennifer Davis, executive director of Beyond Toxics. “They are not consuming the amount of energy or water that these really big data centers, especially the AI computational ones, are consuming. The footprint of the big AI data centers is so much larger than any of these.”…