Broadband connectivity is the benefit. The data center next door is the burden. The Force for Health is the first health platform to map both — at the state, county, and national level — through the twin lens funders are asking for: efficiency and rural health.
The same AI/cloud expansion that wires a community for telehealth also drops power-, water-, and air-intensive buildings into it. Treated separately, each is a niche topic. Mapped together, they become a single, ownable public-health lens.
Broadband availability, adoption, affordability, and measured speed — the infrastructure that makes telehealth and tele-mental-health possible. The efficiency win: care delivered without the drive, in the places furthest from a clinic.
The physical facilities — their backup-generator air emissions, cooling-water draw, grid strain, and siting conflicts. A documented, quantified footprint increasingly landing in rural counties with the least capacity to absorb it.
Federal and philanthropic funders keep asking for the same two things: efficiency (do more health with less energy, water, and cost) and rural health (reach the communities the system leaves behind). Digital infrastructure sits at the exact intersection — and this Scorecard lets you evidence both in a single, sourced, map-driven exhibit.
Telehealth turns miles into minutes and cuts avoidable ER trips; broadband is the cheapest health-access investment per capita. On the other side, data-center energy & water intensity and grid-price spillover are efficiency losses a community can now see and weigh. Same lens measures both the gain and the drag.
Rural counties carry the sharpest connectivity gap and absorb a growing share of the siting burden — big campuses land where land and power are cheap (Louisiana's Richland Parish, rural Virginia, rural Ohio). Rural communities get the infrastructure's cost without guaranteed access to its benefit. This maps that trade, county by county.
Every pathway maps to a real, joinable public dataset, so a Scorecard panel can move from presence → exposure → outcome.
Diesel backup generators & on-site gas turbines → PM2.5, NO₂, asthma, cardiac & cancer risk. The strongest-evidenced pathway.
Evaporative cooling draws potable water — a direct competitor for supply in drought-stressed regions like Arizona.
Load growth raises residential electricity prices & reliability risk — an economic determinant of health.
Continuous cooling/generator noise & industrial siting near homes → sleep disruption, stress, neighborhood impact.
Credit where it's due: Virginia is the confirmed global #1, and it wrote the early playbook on transparency. It's the benchmark FFH measures against — not the model we replicate.
Northern Virginia (Loudoun & Prince William) topped 4,900+ MW of built capacity in 2025 with functional vacancy under 1% — roughly a third of the world's hyperscale capacity. Virginia is also a transparency pioneer: its 2023 water-disclosure law and active hearings on diesel-generator permits gave the country its first real look at the health trade-offs. FFH cites Virginia's methods as precedent — and goes finer-grained, tied to action, wrapped in a coach.
The Sun Corridor (Phoenix–Mesa–Chandler → Tucson) is a top-tier national hub — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, QTS and CyrusOne all operate here. The Buckeye Tech Corridor alone is zoned for up to 40 data centers on 2,069 acres. Today's water use is still small (<0.1% of state supply), but siting water-hungry infrastructure over a drought-stressed, groundwater-dependent aquifer is the live public concern — and exactly why Arizona is the right place to prove the model. Industry is already responding (CyrusOne's zero-water Chandler campus; Microsoft's 2026 closed-loop Phoenix pilot), which makes AZ a place to track solutions, not just problems.
Best-documented water pathway CETI / Tucson footprint alignment Rural + tribal siting on the corridor edgeThe health footprint splits by geography: water in the arid West, air where new fossil generation serves a single campus, and grid/ratepayer cost nearly everywhere — with policy action now emerging.
ERCOT peak demand could top 200 GW before 2030 — roughly double two years prior. An isolated grid plus drought makes reliability and water the twin concerns. Dallas–Fort Worth, Abilene, San Antonio booming.
Ohioans pay about $42/month more for electricity than in 2021, largely tied to data-center demand. Meta's ~1 GW "Prometheus" cluster; ~80 more facilities reportedly proposed. Local diesel & noise complaints.
Data-center emissions nearly doubled 2019→2023 (gas generation). PG&E has fielded 18.7 GW of requests; regulators warn ratepayers may fund upgrades for projects that never fully materialize.
One rural campus toward 5 GW / $50B+, served by three new gas plants — sited between an elementary school and farmland, drawing a congressional probe. Ratepayers face part of a 30-yr loan + ~$550M line.
Retired Homer City coal plant → a ~4.5 GW gas-powered data-center campus, billed as the largest U.S. gas project. New turbines at scale = the air-quality concern; an Amazon–Talen nuclear deal adds pipeline.
A single mega-campus: $3.3B + $4B more (2025), 15 added buildings. Water was the Foxconn-era Lake Michigan flashpoint; Microsoft answered with closed-loop, near-zero-water cooling. Grid demand is the ongoing watch.
~7 hyperscale projects across Palm Beach, Polk, St. Lucie, Nassau & more. Floridan aquifer permitting, rate-shifting & rural pushback led the state to rewrite its AI-data-center rules in 2026.
On July 14, 2026, Executive Order 62 paused state permitting of new hyperscale data centers for up to a year — the first U.S. statewide moratorium — to write energy, water & environmental standards. The clearest "act first" model.
Profiled above. Included here so the landscape reads complete: the market everyone else is measured against, and the source of the first transparency laws FFH cites.
Everything resolves to county FIPS, the Scorecard's existing map grain. The open backbone requires no new licensing; proposals and money layers are state-level and curated.
| Source | What it gives | Grain | Access |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenStreetMap (Overpass) | Existing facility locations | Point → county/state | Open · free |
| EPA ECHO / FRS (NAICS 518210) | Air permits, diesel/gas generators, coordinates | Point → county/state | Open · free |
| EPA EJScreen (already ingested) | PM2.5 / NO₂ / diesel-PM exposure context | Block group | Open · free |
| CDC PLACES (already ingested) | Asthma, COPD, heart-disease outcomes | Tract / county | Open · free |
| U.S. EIA Open Data | Grid load growth & energy burden | State / national | Open API |
| Data Center Watch | Proposed / opposed / delayed projects | Project + state | Free · curate |
| Good Jobs First | Subsidies / public cost of facilities | City + state | Free view · paid bulk |
| FERC RM26-4 filings | Proposed large-load interconnections | Utility / region | Open · manual |
A single toggle showing connectivity (benefit) and data centers (burden) on the same county map. Nobody packages both. It's press-ready, funder-ready, and it turns the Scorecard into a civic tool: "here's what's proposed near you, here's the trade, here's how to weigh in."
Stand up the open backbone. OSM + EPA ECHO (NAICS 518210) → geocode to county FIPS → pins on the Environmental Lens map.
Render the triptych. Overlay the EJScreen & PLACES layers already ingested: presence → exposure → asthma/heart outcomes.
Pilot in Arizona. Prove the model on the water pathway in the Sun Corridor; Virginia stands as the airtight secondary demo.
Add the civic layer. Curate Data Center Watch + subsidies for AZ & the nine profiled states into a "what's proposed near you" panel.
Link it as a live exhibit, cite the figures, and map the applicant's own counties. It evidences efficiency and rural-health reach in one place — the two boxes almost every funder is asking you to check.