September 29, 2026.
Social Media Doesn’t Float in the Cloud — It Runs on Data Centers.
To criticize someone for using an image created by AI on social media or using AI for research while you’re on social media or using the internet for other purposes makes no sense to us.
The internet may feel weightless, but the technology behind it is anything but.
Every photograph uploaded, video streamed, social-media post viewed and cloud-based service used depends on physical infrastructure—data centers filled with computer servers, storage equipment and cooling systems.
Those facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity and, depending on their cooling systems and location, can also consume substantial amounts of water.
That creates an important question: If people are concerned about the environmental costs of data centers and artificial intelligence, how much of the digital technology they use every day are they willing to give up?
The Internet Has a Physical Footprint.
The International Energy Agency estimates that global data centers consumed about 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025. Electricity consumption from data centers increased 17 percent during 2025, substantially faster than overall global electricity demand.
The IEA projects that global data-center electricity consumption will roughly double to about 950 terawatt-hours by 2030, representing nearly 3 percent of global electricity demand. AI-focused data centers are expected to grow even faster than data-center electricity consumption overall.
That growth does not mean every new data center is devoted to AI. Data centers support cloud computing, websites, streaming, business applications, storage, social media and many other digital services.
AI is, however, becoming one of the major drivers of new computing demand.
Data Centers Also Use Water.
Electricity is not the only resource involved.
Some data centers use water in cooling systems to remove heat generated by computer equipment. The amount varies considerably depending on the cooling technology, climate, facility design and electricity source.
There is also an indirect water footprint associated with producing electricity and manufacturing computer equipment. Those indirect impacts should not be confused with water physically consumed by a particular data center.
The result is that the environmental footprint of digital technology extends beyond the facility itself.
Social Media Depends on the Same Infrastructure.
Social media is part of this system.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Truth Social and other platforms depend on computing, storage and network infrastructure to deliver content to users.
The environmental footprint cannot simply be assigned to an individual social-media platform because data centers generally handle many services and workloads simultaneously.
But the basic relationship is clear: social media depends on data centers, and data centers require energy and other resources.
Truth Social provides a particularly straightforward example of AI's role in social media. The company's own moderation FAQ says it uses artificial intelligence to help moderators identify posts that may be deleted or marked as sensitive, while human moderators oversee the process.
So even platforms built around different audiences and philosophies participate in the same underlying digital infrastructure.
AI Could Also Help Solve Some of the Problems It Creates.
There is another side of the data-center debate that deserves attention.
The computing power being built for artificial intelligence is not being used only for chatbots, advertising or social-media recommendations.
Researchers are increasingly using AI to analyze enormous amounts of scientific and medical information.
Cancer research is one example.
The National Cancer Institute says AI is being used across cancer research and care, including cancer biology, screening and diagnosis, drug discovery, surveillance and precision treatment. Researchers are using AI to identify patterns in biological and clinical data and to predict responses to potential treatments.
In a 2026 NIH-funded study, researchers tested an AI model called scSurvival using clinical data from more than 150 cancer patients. The model predicted survival outcomes and identified specific groups of tumor cells associated with higher or lower risk.
That does not mean AI has discovered a universal cure for cancer. Cancer encompasses many different diseases, and promising research still has to be validated through clinical studies and demonstrated to improve patient care.
But it illustrates a larger point: the computing infrastructure driving AI can be used for purposes far beyond entertainment and social media.
The same expanding computational capacity can help researchers analyze biological data, investigate potential drug targets and study how tumors respond to treatment.
The Bigger Question.
None of this eliminates the environmental costs of data centers.
Electricity has to be generated. Cooling systems require resources. Computer chips and servers require energy and raw materials. Communities hosting large facilities can also experience local impacts that are not captured by global statistics.
Those costs deserve scrutiny.
But the debate is more complicated than simply asking whether data centers or AI are good or bad.
Modern society has built an enormous digital ecosystem around them. People use cloud services, social media, streaming platforms, online storage, digital communications and increasingly AI-powered tools every day.
At the same time, researchers are using the same underlying technologies to pursue advances in medicine, energy, science and other fields.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether society will use data centers.
It is how we power them, how efficiently we operate them, how we manage their environmental impacts—and what we choose to do with the enormous computing capacity they provide.
If society is going to demand more computing power, the challenge is to make computing more efficient and ensure that its benefits extend beyond another social-media recommendation.
The internet may appear to float in the cloud.
It doesn't. It runs on data centers—and increasingly, so does the effort to solve some of humanity's biggest problems.
Do we support large noisy data centers moving into people’s neighborhoods and disrupting wild life from their natural habitat along with all the other demands for power and water? Absolutely not. We believe there are solutions that can be found if environmentalist, state governments, and tribal nations are legally required to work with the AI/data center corporations to find solutions.
However if you ever watched a family member suffer through a cancer treatment or watched the aftermath of children mourning the loss their parent, or a parent losing a child from a incurable disease or you are suffering expecting to lose your life sooner than you want to leave us in my view we should consider draining the Gulf of Mexico (America) and building a new highway from Florida to Mexico if it meant a cure.
We believe that Global, U.S., State, Local and Tribal Government Regulation is needed immediately, while expecting bad actors to violate the laws. Criminal and financial penalties must be enacted.
The genie is already out of the bottle. AI created the image below with our command in less than two minutes. Why are we fighting over this? Click here to learn what some of our elected representatives are attempting to do to protect us.
