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.
Brockovich, 66, is now at the centre of one of the most rapidly developing environmental issues in America; one that even threatens to upend the country's midterm elections for Congress in November. "It's bipartisan. it affects everybody," she said. "Politics is definitely going to be involved."
After months of growing anger, many city councils are starting to get the message. More than 500 moratoriums on new data centres are now in place, one of them declared by New York state governor Kathy Hochul. Some of the city councils trying to pause projects are being hit with multi-million lawsuits from the tech companies, however, Brockovich says. That makes it even harder for them to stand up.
Brockovich adds she has nothing against AI, arguing that the "genie is out of the bottle" on the new technology. She acknowledges she even uses it to get information from the tech and AI companies who rarely comment on their intentions beyond their growth plans. But she says the speed with which companies are building these massive operations is something every community should be concerned about.
Many of the data centres are being built in drought-restricted areas, meaning the threat to water rights and access is even more acute. The construction comes as AI companies – from Open AI to Meta and Google and Elon Musk's SpaceX – are racing to develop the technology, as investors throw money at them on the stock market and the administration of Donald Trump pushes them to achieve dominance before China does.
"I don't understand what the sudden rush is," Brockovich says. "It's as if these companies believe there is some sort of window that is going to close."
The phenomenon has been compared to the dot-com boom a quarter century ago, with many worried that it will also lead to a spectacular bust at some point, if the technology, and profits, don't develop as expected. As the AI arms race continues, many of these tech giants have resorted to using natural gas to power their data centres instead of cleaner, renewable energy, because gas is cheaper and more accessible.
Brockovich says her goals are to get companies and local governments to take a step back and assess what the actual environmental impact of building data centres might lead to before going forward.
For many people, climate change and global warming have always been vague terms, she says, which is why they probably never resonated in national politics before. But the data centres are "bringing it to life" for everybody.
"The stakes are too high for all of us," Brockovich adds. "People are mad enough. Maybe data centres are what unites us after all."
