At least five data centers have been approved across Arkansas: two in Little Rock, one in West Memphis, one in Conway, and one in Clarkesville. These data centers support and power technologies like artificial intelligence, data collection and management, and other tech that requires immense amounts of data storage and processing power. They’re largely being built by mega-corporations like Google, Amazon, Meta, and their various subsidiaries.
But what does this mean for Arkansans? At a moment when prices across the board are rising quickly due to a combination of international conflict, tariffs, and corporate consolidation, citizens are raising questions about the need for these data centers and the effect they will have on our state.
The speed with which data centers are moving into Arkansas, the lack of state policy addressing them and their impacts, and the lack of transparency surrounding them raises serious questions for our state. In this series, we’ll explain what data centers are, why they function the way they do, the impacts they have on our state, and what policy options Arkansans have to address them.
What is a data center?
Arkansas has played host to data centers for many years. In the past, these were reasonably-sized buildings, akin to most other corporate holdings, that may take slightly more power and water than a regular office building. Modern data centers, however, are a different beast.
A data center contains hundreds or thousands of computers linked together so they can be efficiently powered and cooled. They can also share data between themselves faster when they’re located close together.
You may notice when you use it too long your laptop gets hot, or the CPU tower fan runs loudly. Putting computers all in one place allows them to use less energy and require less individual cooling. It’s a matter of scale.
These computers (called servers) are where the Internet lives. Every time you “send something to the cloud,” you’re sending it to a data center somewhere else.
So what makes modern data centers so controversial?
- Their size. Modern data centers can be the size of several football fields, and contain several thousand servers. The data center in West Memphis, for instance, will cover over 1,000 acres. That’s about 43,560,000 square feet, or just over 750 football fields. This kind of size means the environmental impacts to construction sites are huge. One of the Little Rock centers is slated for an area near Sweet Home, close to several farms and near the river’s wetlands. This could have a big environmental impact downriver.
- Their power requirements. Pulaski County alone will have two huge data centers. According to the Arkansas Advocate, the center built by AVAIO may be the “most power-intensive nationwide,” drawing up to 1 gigwatt of power from an already-strained power grid. That’s power that won’t go to other consumers, and those consumers may get to foot the bill for the increased demand. These huge power requirements stem from artificial intelligence’s massive computing needs. Multiple data centers on a single grid can have compounding effects, too. Entergy Arkansas claims that it can handle the increased load; they also wouldn’t tell reporters from the Arkansas Advocate just how much power the new centers would use per day.
- Their water requirements. According to Central Arkansas Water CEO Tad Bohannon, just one of the two Little Rock data centers could use up to four million gallons of water per day on hot days. CAW states in its 2024 financial report that the maximum daily water consumption is just over 100 million gallons; so just one building could use roughly 4% of CAW’s total capacity. While CAW claims that they can handle demand, there’s some who are skeptical of that, and worry that other states’ water issues may be coming to Arkansas, compounded by the data centers.
- The lack of transparency surrounding site selection and municipal agreements. As reported by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, multiple municipalities that have agreements with companies building data centers have signed NDAs, or nondisclosure agreements. This means that city employees can’t even talk about what the plans for the data center coming into their city will be. Little Rock, West Memphis, and Conway officials or members of the city Chambers of Commerce have all reported signing these documents. There’s also the matter of how the agreements between the companies and municipalities were signed; in an op-ed to the ADG, Little Rock City Directors Capi Peck and Kathy Webb said the plan for the Little Rock data center was presented with “little notice” at a meeting. When companies require NDAs and city leaders are being asked to vote on these centers with no time to fully consider the issue, Arkansans should pay attention. That lack of transparency is never a good sign. This means we can’t figure out how sites were selected, the true cost of the center, or the details of the agreements between cities and data center companies.
In part 2, we’ll talk about public opinion on data centers and the potential direct costs to Arkansans.
