Just outside Toledo, Ohio, Meta is building an $800 million data center campus. Annually, the data center will use only as much water as two full-service restaurants using a technology known as a closed-loop system. The Great Lakes region offers an unmatched set of resources ripe for data center development, including an abundance of fresh water for cooling; longer, colder winters than the South or Sunbelt; and former industrial lands ready for redevelopment.
But in Illinois, a polarizing data center debate has heated up in recent weeks. I agree with Gov. JB Pritzker’s recent statement at New York’s America is All in Conference. When asked whether we should be welcoming data centers into Illinois, he said that we need to ensure that data centers are bringing their own energy, and they are using their own closed-loop water systems.
There are still very valid public concerns about letting these data centers develop projects untethered to government accountability. I hear them weekly on the campaign trail from Chicagoans who voice concern that we could damage Lake Michigan by exploiting its resources too heavily and that our electricity bills could skyrocket. I have two solutions for those main two concerns.
Regarding the first concern — water usage — many Chicagoans I speak with hear “data center” and picture a server farm drinking up the lake. My vision is to build a massive geothermal heat sink coil system in Lake Michigan. This system is closed loop and filled with liquid coolant. This loop would be miles, perhaps tens or hundreds of miles, long and coiled far offshore at or near the bottom of the lake (the deeper, the better, as it’s colder). This system would consume water over time, thus taking a data center’s water consumption to virtually zero.
The second concern I have heard is that with this new architecture, we would cook the lake. But Lake Michigan holds about a quadrillion gallons of water, so adding data centers is like setting a sealed coffee thermos in a swimming pool — it wouldn’t change. From a thermodynamics perspective, even with miles of coils and loops constantly cooling themselves in Lake Michigan, we likely could not even marginally increase the temperature or create an environmentally noticeable impact. But “it’s fine, trust me” is not good enough for a lake this city drinks from, so I propose a water and environmental study before a single pipe goes in, with the results and data published where anyone can read it.
On top of closed-loop infrastructure at the bottom of the lake, data centers should have windows. It may sound basic, but right now, data center construction typically creates hard cases of primarily concrete with no ability to leverage the outside cold air. They are basically heat-trapping boxes, and, as we now know, they produce a massive amount of heat. When a house is hot, open the windows. When a data center is hot, open the windows.
Chicago’s cooler fall, chilling winter and brisk spring climates all lend themselves to a basic idea of circulating cold air into the data center itself and hot air out. With windows open, they essentially have natural air conditioning three-quarters of the year. The marginal cost to put in windows and natural cooling systems in northern and colder climates such as Chicago far outweighs the risk of continuing to use billions of gallons of water and energy to sustain these operations.
The potential savings are not marginal; they are massive. Cornell University has cooled its campus from a Finger Lake for 25 years and reports saving roughly 85% of the energy conventional refrigeration would burn. Toronto has cooled more than a hundred downtown buildings with Lake Ontario since 2004, saving about 90,000 megawatt hours a year, enough to power a town of 25,000 people. Its system is nearly full, and it is spending $100 million to expand it.
A massive, closed-loop coil system in Lake Michigan could cool much more than data centers; it could provide air conditioning and cooling for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of households and buildings across the city as climate change increases the overall temperature throughout the year.
None of this is theoretical anymore because the demand is already here. Chicago’s data center vacancy rate is under 2%. There is not a single block of 5 megawatts or more available to lease anywhere in this market, and developers asking ComEd to connect new projects are being told 2032 and beyond, which is why they are now buying land based on where the power is rather than where they want to be.
The real question is whether we shape our response or let it shape us.
We are constantly told we have to pick. Jobs or the lake. Investment or affordable power bills. The artificial intelligence economy or the environment. I have never accepted that framing, and my entire plan for Chicago when I am mayor argues against it. This is not a “this or that.” It is both creating more jobs while protecting the lake and environment.
Chicago has an answer, and it is sitting a few miles off Michigan Avenue at the bottom of the lake.
Joe Holberg is a Chicago mayoral candidate. He was a math teacher on the West Side, then a small business owner and entrepreneur helping Chicagoans work toward financial goals.
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