A data center is a building, a group of buildings, or a section of a building that contains large numbers of networked servers (high-performance, specialized computers) and other electronic equipment for storing, managing and disseminating vast amounts of data for the internet as well as related power, cooling, ventilation, fire suppression and security systems.
A hyperscale data center is a very large-scale data center designed to efficiently support massive, scalable computing and data storage, typically used by the largest cloud computing and internet companies, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Such facilities each house at least 5,000 servers and sometimes more than a million, in contrast to the 2,000 to 5,000 for average sized ones, and often use custom-designed hardware and advanced cooling systems.
The number of data centers and their sizes have been growing rapidly, particularly to accommodate the surging demand for artificial intelligence and also for cloud services and for further digitization. Estimates of the total number worldwide for 2025 vary according to the source and definition, but generally range between about 6,000 and 12,000.
Accompanying this surge have been increasingly large environmental effects, both globally and locally. Chief among them is greenhouse gas emissions from consuming enormous amounts of electricity, currently estimated at about one to two percent of the world's total electricity production. This share is expected to at least double by the end of this decade, despite gains in data center efficiency.
Data centers, and particularly hyperscale centers, can also have significant effects on local water supplies. In addition to water used for cooling, they can also consume large amounts of water indirectly through its use in electricity production, especially when powered by fossil fuel plants that require water for steam generation. Other environmental and health effects can include air pollution (e.g., from diesel power electricity generation) and noise pollution.