For the past decade, data centers were welcome guests. Communities competed for them with tax breaks, cheap land, favorable permitting because they meant jobs and economic development.
That era is over. Community pushback is now the rule, not the exception. Residents are showing up to planning meetings angry about water consumption, rising electricity rates, and industrial campuses dropping into their backyards. Permits are being denied and projects are stalling.
The industry’s default response has been to barrel forward and ramp up PR. But Christian Belady thinks that’s the wrong diagnosis entirely. Christian spent decades at HP and Microsoft. At Microsoft, he helped build one of the largest data center footprints in the world.
He invented PUE, the efficiency metric that became the industry standard. And now he’s arguing that the way out of this community crisis isn’t communications, it’s engineering.
So how do we make data centers assets to the communities they operate in?
