The environmental impacts of artificial intelligence and their data centers worry Cambridge officials and staff, and each of the technologies came up at a City Council meeting Monday.
“They are coming,” councillor Patty Nolan said, pointing to an initiative by governor Maura Healey to attract data centers to the state while Cambridge needs additional electrical substations. “It’s critically important, if we do that, that our city does not bear the brunt of the extra energy use. Our grid is is coming to the point where it’s already being tested.”
Even the power expected to come from a massive Eversource project in Kendall Square – an 11-story underground substation using more than 8 miles of cable – is essentially earmarked just for the surrounding developments, Nolan said, and the city and state is already in drought. “There’s water use in data centers,” she said. “If there’s a bunch of data centers that come in, it’s going to be really problematic.”
Artificial intelligence has begun its creep into municipal business with a “secure internal chatbot” based on Microsoft Copilot that staff can use for day-to-day tasks such as drafting content, brainstorming, summarizing information and conducting preliminary research, city manager Yi-An Huang said. Workers also have guidelines for use and a cross-departmental working group is in place to talk through AI’s legal, operational, equity and security considerations.
That raised questions for Nolan about AI’s notoriously intense power demand, which the city’s new chief information officer, Jay Fusco, confirmed was a concern.
“What’s happening behind the scenes when you enter a simple AI prompt in Copilot or ChatGPT is an order of magnitude more expensive from a compute perspective – i.e., energy – and we have to take that into consideration,” Fusco said. In existing guidelines there is “not a lot on sustainability,” he admitted, but the AI working group is only a few months old and has taken up environmental costs as a topic.
“AI is not going to go away,” Fusco said. “But we can that tailor our usage” and make choices of products “that do recognize sustainability as a main tenet.”
While mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said city councillors could help staff focus on the implications through committee discussion, Nolan pointed out an area that needed attention immediately: There are data centers coming that can’t be regulated because the new technology doesn’t appear in the city’s table of uses for property. Some data centers demand sprawl, but among the at least 45 opened in the state, some “can be established in spaces as small as one or more floors of buildings,” Nolan said.
Different kinds of data centers
Councillor Burhan Azeem supported Nolan’s order calling for a review of the legal and regulatory landscape. But he said what would be built locally should be thought of differently from the very large AI data-training centers that have been built out in the rest of the country.
“The No. 1 uses for data centers in urban spaces, especially in prime real estate like Cambridge, are emergency response coordination, air quality management, 5G cell service and remote surgeries where every millisecond really matters,” Azeem said. “A data center is just a bunch of computers in a room, and there’s a lot of different sorts of uses.”
One of two data centers in construction in Cambridge belongs to the city – it is for emergency response coordination from 911 calls, Azeem said, calling for some nuance and an understanding of tradeoffs.
“They definitely use more water and electricity than an office. They also use less water than a lab, right? They cause less traffic impact than an office, because there’s not as many jobs in that center, but they create less jobs. They have more property tax per square foot. Right now in Binney Street in particular, we have a lot of vacancies. So it’s also a question of … when we have higher office and lab vacancies, would we prefer to wait until those fill up with more offices and labs? Or do we want data centers?”
Councillors approved Nolan’s data center regulation order for staff. They voted to accept the city manager’s report on AI and another one about replacing the software that keeps the city running.
Aging city software
The “enterprise resource planning software system” known as PeopleSoft is more than 25 years old yet is relied on to pay employees and vendors, manage benefits and track finances in every city department, helping “meet important financial, regulatory and service obligations,” staff said in a memo.
“We still have staff, as embarrassing as it is to admit, who do paper-based timesheets and then they walk them over somewhere and then someone else puts them in,” Nolan said.
Replacing the software will take $15 million to $20 million over five years and go out to bid in July 2027, assistant city manager for fiscal affairs Claire Brewer Spinner said.
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