It's been more than 30 years since Erin Brockovich made history – and had a movie made after her – for standing against one of America's largest power companies and winning a $333 million groundwater pollution suit for a small California town. People still email her with environmental concerns. This past spring she noticed a spike in emails from a small Pennsylvania county concerned about the sudden growth of a large AI data centre in their community.
Data centres are giant warehouses full of powerful computers used to run digital services from movie streaming to online banking. There are more than 4,000 across the US, the most in the world. The UK and Germany are next with more than 500 each.
There are concerns about the huge amount of energy and water the new data centres will consume, as well as the water that makes is funnelled out back into local water sources. Following those emails, Brockovich quickly built out a digital map of data centres across the country and within 72 hours had received email complaints from every state in the US. That has now become a dozen countries.
"What they all have in common is the secrecy, the lack of transparency to people about what is going on," Brockovich says. "People's water bills are going up. Their electricity bills are going up.
Even their property bills are going up. They are changing zoning laws. Some people say local councils are trying to claim their property by eminent domain to lay transmission wires and cables." The Brockovich Data Center Map currently shows more than 9,200 complaints, coming from all 50 states.
Texas has the most complaints, followed by Ohio and Virginia. The complaints are tied to 112 operating data centres, 143 under construction, and 128 under proposal at last count. Out of a total of more than 4,000 data centres across the country.
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