From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.

And welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum,

some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take.

I'm your host today, senior editor Will Kayback.

In today's Friday edition, we're going to be tackling data centers. Now, you've

probably heard the saying that all politics are local, even as you might observe that national

political issues are increasingly trickling down to the local level. However, when it comes to

data centers, the old adage is coming true again. Local issues are

sparing national debate in the halls of Congress. Data centers are facilities that house critical

information technology infrastructure, such as servers, storage systems, and networking equipment.

Now, they aren't a new invention.

They've provided the backbone for cloud services and internet applications for decades,

but the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has created massive demand for new hubs.

AI companies use the IT infrastructure within data centers to train and deploy their models,

which require huge amounts of compute power to run reliably and use a lot of electricity to operate and cool.

Today, many new data centers are being built expressly to support AI.

That push has generated blowback from residents of the towns and rural

communities where new facilities are being constructed. Water use, land use, and electricity use

are among the most prominent concerns. Some reports have found that large data centers use

five million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the

water use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Others have noted that the largest facilities

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