Data Centers Support Our Digitized Economy. But They’re Bad For The Environment

TV and movies are streamed, our communication becomes data in the form of emails, texts and tweets, and AI appears in new parts of our lives. Our increasingly digitized economy is fueling the need for more places to store information. But large data centers use the same amount of water as small municipalities in the U.S. on a daily basis just to cool down their servers. Reset learns more about how data centers work and what needs to be done to reduce the environmental impact from Andrew Chien, professor computer science, University of Chicago, Chheng Lim, architect SNHA and Karen Weigert, Reset sustainability contributor and director of Loyola University Chicago’s Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility. For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.