By Carolyn Stein
A controversial data center proposal in Naperville is set to once again come before the Planning and Zoning Commission Wednesday evening.
Developer Karis Critical’s plan calls for the construction of a 211,000-square-foot, 36-megawatt building, half of what it had initially requested, on the former Alcatel-Lucent site off Interstate 88. The land at 1960 Lucent Lane is zoned for office, research and light industry, a category that includes data centers, but the project needs city variance approval before it can move forward.
Ever since the proposal came to light, many Naperville residents have pushed back against the project. Data centers have been popping up around the suburbs of Chicago as the state makes an effort to bring these projects to Illinois.
The Naperville Sun spoke with a few experts to discuss what a data center is and the industry’s impact on the state. While not an exhaustive list, this article hopes to cover some questions readers may have.
What is a data center?
In its most basic form, data centers are warehouses with computers in them.
They serve as the backbone of the internet and society’s digital infrastructure. Anything you access online, such as electronic healthcare records and banking and financial transactions, are supported by data centers, according to Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition.
“But what happened is that these buildings with computers in them, which is basically what they were in the late 1990s, turned into successively larger and larger buildings,” said Andrew Chien, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago.
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, some data centers are requiring more power to run their computing systems. Chien said the most power intensive one he has seen is a five-gigawatt data center (one gigawatt is equivalent to the power for the city of Philadelphia).
In 2001, a 36-megawatt data center would’ve been considered a large-sized data center, but in today’s era it’s considered more small to medium size, Chien said. A 36-megawatt data center is also the equivalent of about 20,000 homes in Naperville, which Brian Groth, Naperville’s electric utility director, confirmed.