The AI Data Center Boom Is an Environmental Justice Crisis

The rapid expansion of data centers to power artificial intelligence (AI) is often described as a story of modern technology, innovation, and economic development. But for many environmental justice communities, it is a story about issues more familiar: a fight over land, water, energy, pollution, public money, and who gets a meaningful say before decisions are made.

That is why the National Wildlife Federation’s (NWF)  Environmental Justice, Health, and Community Resilience and Revitalization Program hosted a three-part Clean Economy Coalition of Color roundtable series on data centers.

The series began with local perspectives and community impacts, where organizers and community leaders described what it means when data centers are proposed, approved, or built in underserved communities.

Our second roundtable focused on policy and public health insights, examining the health risks, regulatory gaps, and governance questions raised by large-scale data center development.

Our final roundtable turned to climate impacts and energy use, looking at how data centers are reshaping energy demand, utility planning, fossil fuel infrastructure, and household affordability.

I knew going into the series that data centers were becoming an environmental justice issue. I was still floored by what we heard. Across all three conversations, the lesson was clear: we cannot separate the artificial intelligence data center boom from environmental justice. The data center boom is an environmental justice crisis.

Below are some of the themes that emerged across our conversations with experts and what they mean for the environmental justice movement.  

1. The “cloud” may be invisible, but data centers are not

Data centers may be described by developers as clean, quiet, low impact, or essentially “invisible,” but for communities living near them, the infrastructure is anything but invisible.

As I said in my opening for this roundtable series, “[A data center] doesn’t feel invisible when a data center is in your community because the infrastructure is not virtual. It’s physical and it has to go somewhere. It pulls electricity from somebody’s grid. It pulls water from somebody’s watershed. It reshapes land use and local planning. And it can bring a swath of other infrastructure into communities…” 

These facilities can require substations, transmission lines, construction traffic, diesel backup generators, new gas infrastructure, or additional water and wastewater capacity. They are large facilities, some campuses over one million square feet (about 17 football fields), with real environmental, health, and economic consequences.

In some people’s minds, these facilities are abstract pieces of technology, but to environmental justice communities, where residents already live with accumulating environmental stressors, they are another industrial burden.

2. Health, water, energy, and climate impacts are connected and should not be understated

The second and third roundtables made clear that data center impacts cannot be evaluated one issue at a time. Panelists discussed extreme water use, wastewater burdens, construction impacts, air pollution, noise pollution, high energy demand, increased greenhouse gas emissions worsening the impacts of climate change, and cumulative impacts in communities.

For example, Dr. Amy Margolies of Tucker United described a proposed power plant in West Virginia with 30 million gallons of diesel stored on site near a watershed. A spill, she warned, could affect “every single community” downstream.

Energy use and costs were also central concerns, particularly in our final conversation. Shannon Heyck-Williams of NWF described how those costs can be shifted from data centers onto households: “Utilities often make costly upgrades to power grids so that they can handle increased energy demand… because of new data centers. [Households] often are now being asked to shoulder the costs of these upgrades that they’re not really benefiting from.”

The data center boom also raises serious concerns for climate action. Dr. John Fleming of the Center for Biological Diversity warned that data center growth could increase reliance on fossil fuels just as the country needs to move away from them. He noted that data centers currently account for about 4.5 percent of U.S. energy demand, but that share could rise to 12 percent by 2030.

“We’re in a scenario now where, for a couple of decades at least, we have seen a decline in power sector emissions,” Dr. Fleming said. “And now we have this threat of them increasing because of this build out of data centers and this focus on AI.”

He also emphasized that the impacts of climate change are not evenly distributed: “As you increase these climate effects, extreme heat, drought, extreme precipitation, we’re going to inevitably have to adapt to those changes. And often marginalized communities are the least equipped to adapt to those kinds of things.”

This is why panelists urged decision-makers to look beyond the footprint of any single facility. A permit may evaluate one source, one facility, or one pollutant, but residents live with the combined reality of air pollution, water stress, noise, truck traffic, heat, high utility bills, and preexisting health burdens.

3. Too often, communities are brought in after decisions are already made

Across all our roundtable conversations, community representatives and advocates described learning about projects through energy planning conversations, permit notices, rumors, or after companies had already started operating.

In the first roundtable, Marquita Bradshaw of Sowing Justice described trying to understand what a data center was after the Tennessee Valley Authority expressed concerned about powering them. Marquita discussed that, as she dug in on the issue further, data center operation and development was already moving across Tennessee without communities being informed:  “…unbeknownst to me was the data centers were already operating in Tennessee, and they had circumvented all the processes, [and] they had already started to build the relationships to power the data centers and so that’s what drew me to the issues.”

In the second roundtable, Dr. Amy Margolies of Tucker United described how a proposal for a 1,600-megawatt gas power plant with diesel backup, intended to power a hyperscale data center complex, surfaced after someone noticed a permit notice in the local paper. “Nobody knew what it was,” she said, including the county commission.

This pattern raises a familiar question in environmental justice: whose knowledge counts before decisions are made? Too often, environmental justice communities are not brought into the planning and design phases of projects that will directly affect the places they call home.

The people making those decisions often do not live there. They may not know the cumulative air pollution burden residents already face, the history of disinvestment, or the strain on local water systems.

They may only see land, water, energy infrastructure, and a permitting path that looks cheap or politically convenient. For residents, those same decisions can mean another layer of risk added to an already overburdened community.

4. The promised benefits often do not match the burdens

Data centers are often framed in context of economic development, companies that will bring new jobs to communities. But experts across our roundtable discussions consistently questioned: do data centers actually bring jobs to communities, and who actually benefits?

In the first roundtable, Dr. Khalil Shahyd from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) challenged the idea that hyperscale data centers automatically create economic prosperity for communities.

He noted, “When we look at the experience of places like data center alley in Northern Virginia, we look at Ohio, we look at Memphis, we look at so many of these different places, the economic development just doesn’t really materialize. Often times, [data center companies] are cooking the books like quite literally [by] adding multipliers to the implant model to make it seem like they’re creating all these indirect and, quote unquote, induced jobs.”

He went on to explain that the jobs created are not jobs that provide a living wage: “…When they say that we will create additional jobs through a data center, they mean that, you know, we’re going to create 20 to 25 middle-class jobs. And these middle-class jobs are then going to finance a bunch of low-wage service workers to serve these middle-class people who are coming in to work at this data center. So, the jobs that [data center companies] are creating are not quality jobs. They’re not livelihood jobs. You know, they’re not living wage jobs that are being created. And that is not economic development.”

Panelists described that data centers  are often promoted as progress while offering few permanent jobs, receive public subsidies, increase utility pressure, and shift infrastructure costs onto residents.

For communities that have already seen decades of promises from polluting industries, calling a project “innovative,” “modern,” or “promising” is not enough. The real question is whether it actually builds community wealth, improves public well-being, and distributes other community benefits.

Communities are already pushing back

The data center boom is often presented as inevitable. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “Well it’s happening, so might as well jump onboard.” Across the roundtables, speakers rejected that framing, describing communities documenting harm, contesting permits, building coalitions, and insisting that these data centers are not insulated from democratic accountability.

In the third roundtable, Dr. Brandy Brown, founder of Sadberry Singer, pointed to moratoriums in Michigan as one tool communities are using to slow projects down and demand better standards. She also argued that environmental regulation needs to catch up with modern monitoring tools. “There is a need to modernize how we measure,” she said.

And in the first roundtable, Marquita Bradshaw reminded us that organizing still matters. When people call a project a done deal, she said that’s not necessarily true, “it can be undone.” She added, “…who would have thought organizations with less than, you know, sometimes $100,000 a year would be on the front lines fighting data centers and winning, right?”

These fights are not only happening in the communities represented in our roundtables. In Georgia, public concern has pushed data centers into the state legislature. In Texas, Brazoria County officials unanimously rejected tax abatements for a proposed $3 billion AI data center after residents and local officials raised concerns.

And in Virginia, public support for new data centers has weakened sharply as residents raise concerns about utility costs, infrastructure strain, and local control. Data Center Water, a research firm, reported in 2025 that $64 billion of data center project were blocked or delayed because of local opposition.

That shift matters. Communities are not simply being swept along by this AI data center boom. They are naming the costs, challenging the process, questioning the subsidies, documenting the harms, and refusing to accept that the infrastructure behind AI must be built on the same old patterns of pollution, secrecy, and sacrifice.

The AI data center boom is moving fast, but communities are moving too. The lesson from this series is not only that communities are at risk. It is that communities understand what is at stake. They are organizing, pushing back, and in places across the country, beginning to win.

Sign up to NWF’s Environmental Justice, Health, and Community Resilience and Revitalization’s mailing list and follow us on Instagram to learn about future CECC roundtables.