Data centers' environmental impact is hard to quantify. Here's how we did it.

Data centers' environmental impact is hard to quantify. Here's how we did it.

A data center under construction in Chandler, Arizona.Jesse Rieser for BITech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers, racing to power an AI revolution they say will bring broad benefits and enormous profits.The actual price, though, has never been fully measured. So a team of Business Insider reporters and editors set out to find the true cost of the US data center boom — in water, power, pollution, and tax …