With the acceleration of the construction of the AI data centre in the United States, such facilities are increasingly being found on the outskirts of cities and near residential areas. Architects and engineering companies have begun to rethink the appearance, size and supporting approach of data centres, in an attempt to respond to community concerns about noise, water and electricity pressures.
Data centres are closer to residential areas.
Business Insider quoted analysis that by the end of 2025, more than 1,400 data centres had been built or approved in the United States. With the tightening of exploitable land, some projects have begun to approach residential areas, and the problem of neighbourhood shelter has risen.
A 2024 study in Virginia showed that 29 per cent of the plots operating in the data centre were less than 200 feet from residential plots. Among the most frequently asked questions by the population were continued noise, increased water use and pressure on the electricity system and the price of electricity.
Construction firm restructuring project pattern
Construction firm Gensler states that the construction speed, size, power access and subsequent expansion are still the most important for the clients of the mega-data centre. Under these constraints, the design team can do more than just make the project a closed industrial box.
The company described the conversion of an old call centre park to about 1 million square feet of computing facilities and the addition of approximately 1 acres of public park through materials and site planning. It is common practice to first adopt replicable prototypes and then adjust the external and layout to different locations.
The British engineering and construction company Arup is also studying the need for a change in the traditional low-level horizontal form of data centres to higher and more compact multi-storey buildings once they enter the city. It also suggested that noise could be addressed through sound barriers, landscape buffers and topography adjustments.
It's hard to solve the heat.
Some design teams have tried to get data centres to provide more direct returns to communities. Forma, a New York construction studio, had introduced the concept of a “ pink hot spring bath”, which envisaged the use of heat from underground servers for public baths. Arup also envisaged the integration of data centres with tomato farms to support agricultural production using waste heat.
Such programmes, however, usually rely on local governments and developers to synchronize the construction of supporting facilities, such as regional heating networks, and therefore may not be easy to land in the short term. Safety requirements and alternative power allocation also limit some of the more radical urbanization programmes.
According to the architect Marina Otero Verzier, after-heat reuse does not solve the underlying problem, as heat itself is a by-product of emissions. She suggested that there might be a need to design different types of facilities for different data uses in the future, rather than a default that all data must be immediately mobilized and that community resources should not be configured only around the expansion needs of large technology companies.