The Ohio Academy of Science invites undergraduate and graduate teams to take on a problem Ohio is living through right now. Data centers are going up across the state faster than the systems around them can comfortably absorb, and the questions that raises are not simple ones. They are technical, environmental, economic, and social all at once, which is exactly why no single discipline can answer them alone.

This challenge asks a team of students to choose one piece of that problem, study it seriously, and propose something better. Teams submit a written report in late September. Three finalist teams are invited to present their work in person at the OAS Annual Meeting in October, in front of the Meeting audience and a panel of invited judges, and all three are invited to publish in The Ohio Journal of Science.

As artificial intelligence technology advances, the computing infrastructure behind AI has to live somewhere physical, and increasingly that somewhere is Ohio. Central Ohio in particular now hosts one of the densest concentrations of data center development in the country, with more announced nearly every quarter.

A facility of this kind is an enormous, continuous consumer of electricity. It runs at full load every hour of every day, which makes its demands on the grid different in kind from a factory or an office park. Keeping the equipment inside from overheating requires either large volumes of water or a great deal of additional energy, and choosing between those two is a real engineering decision with real consequences either way. The buildings occupy substantial land, often farmland, and they change the character of the places that host them. They bring investment and construction jobs, though far fewer permanent positions than their footprint might suggest. Meanwhile utilities, regulators, and local governments are writing the rules governing all of this in something close to real time.

None of these tensions has a settled answer. That is what makes the problem worth handing to students rather than simply describing to them. The decisions Ohio makes about this infrastructure over the next few years will shape the state for decades, and the people who will live with those decisions longest are the ones still in school.