✦Upcoming✦ 14 AUG 2026 (FRI) 10:00-12:00

Geography Distinguished Seminar Series

The local consequences of the cloud: Data centers, housing markets, and grid resilience

Date: 14 AUG 2026 (Friday)

Time: 10:00-12:00 (HKT)

Venue: CPD-3.29, The Jockey Club Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Mode: Hybrid

Via Zoom: Zoom link will be provided upon successful registration

Registration link: TBC

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Abstract:

Data centers are often described as part of the AI and cloud economy, but they are also large local infrastructure projects. They need land, electricity, water, cooling, backup power, and utility upgrades, and their effects on nearby communities can go well beyond jobs and tax revenue. This talk brings together two studies on the local effects of data center growth. The first paper looks at how data centers affect nearby home values, using residential property transactions from CoreLogic and ATTOM. The current analysis covers eight U.S. states—Arizona, California, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington—from 2005 to 2024. It asks whether data centers show up in housing markets through both potential benefits, such as investment and tax revenue, and potential costs, such as noise, traffic, land-use conflict, and pressure on local infrastructure. The second paper studies data centers and residential power reliability in Florida from 2014 to 2025, using county-level data for all 67 counties. It finds that data center growth is linked to better routine reliability and lower peak outage severity during hurricanes, though the benefits are not evenly shared. Together, the papers show why data center policy is difficult. Data centers can bring local benefits, but they can also create housing, land-use, grid-cost, and equity concerns. The talk argues that policymakers should treat them not only as economic-development projects, but also as local infrastructure that affects households, housing markets, and electricity customers.

Professor Yueming Qiu

Professor and Associate Dean, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland College Park

Yueming (Lucy) Qiu is a professor, the Roy F. Weston Chair in Natural Economics, and associate dean for research and faculty affairs in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland College Park. Her research group focuses on using big data with quasi-experimental and experimental methods to answer empirical questions related to the interactions among consumer behaviors, low-carbon technologies and incentives. Her research projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Department of Defense, Electric Power Research Institute and Water Research Foundation. Qiu received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and B.S. from Tsinghua University. She has published in journals including The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Nature Energy, Nature Sustainability, Joule and Nature Communications. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the APPAM World Citizen Prizes in Environmental Performance. She served as the vice president of academic affairs of the United States Association for Energy Economics (USAEE) and co-chair of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM)'s Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy area.

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