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JPMorgan Chase has found a way to turn a huge amount of ordinary parking space into a source of clean electricity. At its McCoy Center campus in Columbus, Ohio, the bank installed about 40,000 solar panels on elevated canopies covering much of the parking area.

The project is impressive partly because it uses land that was already serving another purpose. Instead of building a solar farm on additional open land, the panels sit above parking spaces, creating a giant solar canopy while keeping the parking area underneath.

The system covers roughly 165,000 square feet of parking and includes panels mounted about 20 to 25 feet above the ground. The parking lot itself can accommodate thousands of vehicles, meaning the same space can provide parking, shade and electricity at the same time.

JPMorgan Chase says the installation generates about 14.8 megawatts of electricity. Combined with solar panels already installed on the building’s rooftop, the system can meet around 75% of the McCoy Center’s electricity needs.

The scale is unusual for a corporate office. JPMorgan Chase has described the Polaris installation as one of the world’s largest commercial office solar projects. The McCoy Center itself is enormous, covering around 2 million square feet and housing thousands of employees.

The idea also highlights a broader opportunity for solar power. Parking lots are already widespread across cities, business campuses, shopping centers, airports and universities. Adding solar canopies allows those existing paved areas to produce electricity without requiring an entirely new piece of land for the panels.

There is another practical benefit: the elevated panels can provide shade over parked vehicles, while the electricity generated above them can help power the buildings nearby.

JPMorgan Chase’s Ohio campus shows how a space designed for parked cars can be transformed into something much more productive. Instead of choosing between parking and solar power, the project effectively combines the two.

Sources: JPMorgan Chase; U.S. commercial solar industry reporting.

Humans survived for thousands of years without data centers. We did not have cloud computing, massive server campuses or AI infrastructure—and yet civilization continued to develop. Clean water is different. Safe water is not a luxury technology can replace; it is a fundamental requirement for human life.

That contrast is at the heart of the message in the source image. As data centers expand to support cloud services and rapidly growing AI workloads, their demand for resources—particularly electricity and, in some cooling systems, water—is receiving increasing attention.

Large data centers can use water directly for cooling. Evaporative cooling systems remove heat by allowing some water to evaporate, meaning additional water must be supplied to keep the system operating. The amount varies significantly depending on the facility, climate, cooling technology and water source.

The issue becomes especially important in places where communities are already dealing with limited water supplies.

Research has found that U.S. data centers can have substantial direct water consumption, while a significant portion of the electricity used by data centers can also have an indirect water footprint because generating electricity may require water.

That does not mean data centers are unnecessary. Modern society relies on them for banking, communications, healthcare systems, online services, business operations and much of the internet. But the comparison in the image makes a different point: when water resources are limited, the consequences of using clean water for industrial cooling can be much more fundamental than the loss of a digital service.

And there is an important distinction between data centers themselves and the way they are designed. Some newer facilities are moving toward cooling approaches that reduce or eliminate continuous water consumption, while others use reclaimed or recycled water instead of potable supplies.

So the real question is not simply whether society should have data centers.

It is whether the rapidly expanding digital infrastructure can be built in ways that protect the resources humans cannot live without.

Because technology can change. Cooling systems can change. Data centers can change.

Our dependence on clean water cannot.

SOURCE: Sources: U.S. data-center water research summarized by the U.S. data-center environmental footprint literature;