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From KQED. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

More than 230 environmental groups this month sent a letter to Congress, warning that data centers that power the internet and increasingly AI are threatening Americans' economic climate and water security.

Meanwhile, industry groups say the environmental impacts of data centers have been oversimplified and overblown.

California is home to more than 320 data centers, the third most in the U.S., with plans for more in the works.

So this hour, we take a closer look at

how and why data centers can be so energy and resource-intensive. And hear from you, listeners,

if you think that tradeoff for delivering huge amounts of computing power is worth it.

Joining me first is Molly Taft, senior climate reporter at Wired. Molly, welcome to

Forum. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to talk about this. Good. Because for people

I'm familiar with these large warehouses full of servers called data centers, I think they're wondering

what you can tell us generally about what they're like and what their resource needs are.

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about them, obviously, over the past few years as this kind

of buildout has exploded. But a lot of people don't actually know what these centers need

in terms of resources. So very simply, a data center is a facility that houses a lot of servers that do computing tasks. This could be anything from, you know, hosting cloud files to running programs that help you watch Netflix to AI, which is AI processes, which is really where the conversation has gone in the past few years.

You know, traditionally, a lot of the data centers that were built before 2022, 2023, in places like California, in places like Virginia,

were used for general computing processes,

...