From a global perspective, AI’s impact on future electricity demand is actually projected to be relatively small. But data centres are concentrated in dense clusters, where they can have profound local impacts. They are much more spatially concentrated than are other energy-intensive facilities, such as steel mills and coal mines. Companies tend to build data-centre buildings close together so that they can share power grids and cooling systems and transfer information efficiently, both among themselves and to users. Virginia, in particular, has attracted data-centre firms by providing tax breaks, leading to even more clustering.