Hannah Beckler

New York

Senior Editor, Investigations at Business Insider

Senior Editor, Investigations @BusinessInsider | She/Her

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Articles

Massive subsidies, minimal jobs: The math behind America's data center boom

1 week ago | businessinsider.com | Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Ellen Thomas |Daniel Geiger

Columbus, Ohio, escaped the Rust Belt rut years ago. Regional economic development officials offered incentives that attracted warehouses, manufacturing plants, and healthcare startups, reviving the economy and generating jobs. By 2018, hundreds of these deals over the previous eight years had created some 150,000 jobs. Central Ohio now hopes to repeat that success. It's betting big on "Silicon Heartland," a high-tech innovation hub that proponents hope will be flush with high-paying jobs.
Big Tech promised jobs. Cities gave millions. Where are the workers?

1 week ago | aol.com | Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Ellen Thomas |Daniel Geiger

Columbus, Ohio, escaped the Rust Belt rut years ago. Regional economic development officials offered incentives that attracted warehouses, manufacturing plants, and healthcare startups, reviving the economy and generating jobs. By 2018, hundreds of these deals over the previous eight years had created some 150,000 jobs. Central Ohio now hopes to repeat that success. It's betting big on "Silicon Heartland," a high-tech innovation hub that proponents hope will be flush with high-paying jobs.
Big Tech promised jobs. Cities gave millions. Where are the workers?

1 week ago | yahoo.com | Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Ellen Thomas |Daniel Geiger

Columbus, Ohio, escaped the Rust Belt rut years ago. Regional economic development officials offered incentives that attracted warehouses, manufacturing plants, and healthcare startups, reviving the economy and generating jobs. By 2018, hundreds of these deals over the previous eight years had created some 150,000 jobs. Central Ohio now hopes to repeat that success. It's betting big on "Silicon Heartland," a high-tech innovation hub that proponents hope will be flush with high-paying jobs.
Data Center Development's Economic, Environmental Costs

1 week ago | businessinsider.com | Jake Swearingen |Hannah Beckler |Henry Blodget

Business Insider's "The True Cost of Data Centers" series explores the impacts — on water, power, pollution, and local economies — of Big Tech's race to dominate a future built on AI. The AI boom has sparked a rush to build data center infrastructure across the US. By Business Insider's count, companies had filed permits to build 311 data centers nationwide as of 2010. By the end of 2024, that number had nearly quadrupled to 1,240.
AI runs on dirty power and the public pays the price

1 week ago | businessinsider.com | Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Ellen Thomas |Henry Blodget

The data center boom is driving utilities to torpedo renewable energy goals and rely on fossil fuels, pushing data centers' expected air-pollution-related public health costs to between $5.7 billion and $9.2 billion annually, a Business Insider investigation found. As Big Tech bets on generative AI, electricity demand for data centers far outstrips what renewable power can currently provide.
AI runs on dirty power - and the public pays the price

1 week ago | aol.com | Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Ellen Thomas

The data center boom is driving utilities to torpedo renewable energy goals and rely on fossil fuels, pushing data centers' expected air-pollution-related public health costs to between $5.7 billion and $9.2 billion annually, a Business Insider investigation found. As Big Tech bets on generative AI, electricity demand for data centers far outstrips what renewable power can currently provide.
AI's promise is still taking shape. The costs of its data centers are already here.

1 week ago | businessinsider.com | Jake Swearingen |Adam Rogers |Hannah Beckler |Dakin Campbell

A blank rectangle of a building sits next to a highway, facing an endless Wyoming prairie. It's painted the greenish-grayish-brown that Disneyland imagineers use on stuff they don't want people to notice. But the nine semitrailer-size green boxes nestling like nursing puppies into the building's long sides are a giveaway.
Tallying the true costs of AI

1 week ago | yahoo.com | Adam Rogers |Hannah Beckler |Dakin Campbell

A blank rectangle of a building sits next to a highway, facing an endless Wyoming prairie. It's painted the greenish-grayish-brown that Disneyland imagineers use on stuff they don't want people to notice. But the nine semitrailer-size green boxes nestling like nursing puppies into the building's long sides are a giveaway.
Data centers' environmental impact is hard to quantify. Here's how we did it.

1 week ago | businessinsider.com | Jake Swearingen |Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Narimes Parakul

Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers, racing to power an AI revolution they say will bring broad benefits and enormous profits. The actual price, though, has never been fully measured. So a team of Business Insider reporters and editors set out to find the true cost of the US data center boom — in water, power, pollution, and tax incentives.
How Business Insider investigated the true cost of data centers

1 week ago | yahoo.com | Hannah Beckler |Rosemarie Ho |Narimes Parakul |Dakin Campbell

Tech companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers, racing to power an AI revolution they say will bring broad benefits and enormous profits. The actual price, though, has never been fully measured. So a team of Business Insider reporters and editors set out to find the true cost of the US data center boom — in water, power, pollution, and tax incentives.