You contribute to this conversation about data centers. Share your challenge or solution in four minute rounds with the group.
Data Center Solutions Sprint
A Virtual Policy Roundtable for Planners, Elected Officials, Researchers, and Community Leaders
Join us for a fast-paced collaborative workshop to identify practical strategies for managing the opportunities and challenges of data center development.
Using timed 4-minute discussion rounds in Zoom breakout rooms, attendees will rotate through priority topics, rapidly sharing ideas, questions, and potential policy solutions. After the rotations, everyone will reconvene to identify the strongest recommendations and create a shared list of strategies for planners, policy advocates, local governments, researchers, utilities, and interested community members.
Our goal is to build a practical resource of issues, mitigation strategies, policy ideas, research needs, and implementation tools that participants can use in their own jurisdictions.
Discussion Topics Include
- Water demand and conservation
- Wastewater management
- Heat generation and cooling technologies
- Noise and light pollution
- Soil, vegetation, wildlife, and ecosystem impacts
- Neurologic and physiologic stressors associated with data center infrastructure
- Primary power generation and private utility models
- Backup power systems (diesel, natural gas, batteries, and emissions)
- Harmonics, electromagnetic fields (EMF), and low-frequency/suprasound concerns
- Electric grid reliability, utility costs, and infrastructure impacts
- Revenue, taxation, and financing—what are data centers worth and how do jurisdictions capture value?
- Digital real estate, AI infrastructure, and emerging valuation models
- Local government authority, permitting, and legal challenges
- Jurisdictional questions: Where does the data legally exist, and who has authority?
- Public safety, cybersecurity, and jurisdictional responsibilities
- Loss of agricultural land, natural capital, and ecosystem services
- Throughput strategies—keeping financial, built, natural, and social capital circulating locally while reducing resource extraction, waste, and external impacts
- Your suggested topic
Event Format
- Brief introduction
- Multiple 4-minute breakout discussions
- Rotate to new topics and participants
- Group reporting and idea synthesis
- Collaborative development of a shared strategy list
- Follow-up compilation of issues, solutions, and research resources for participants
Interested in sharing your challenge or solution? When you register, please let us know which topic you would like to briefly introduce or talk on. Policy advocates, planners and community members are all welcome.
