Eliana Perozo, Next City.
Here’s What Other Communities Should Know.
These facilities are being built across the country without many guardrails. We’ve gathered five resources from organizations aiming to help residents and local leaders protect themselves.
With data centers popping up faster than most people can count, it’s hard to keep track of them.
But a recent report from the Pew Research Center shows more than a third of Americans (38%) live within five miles of at least one operational data center.
Historically, data centers have been built in more urban areas, but with the popularization of AI, sources show developers are shifting toward building in more rural communities. According to the Pew Research Center, newer data centers are expected to be predominantly built in rural areas. Places that face water droughts and low water supplies could face the most exponential impact as community members suffer from the high demands of water.
Water plays a large role in maintaining data centers, which are the physical embodiment of the internet. They are giant hard drives that have to stay cool, or else they will fry. The more data centers we have, the more water is needed to keep them cool. Large data centers use up to 5 million gallons of water per day for cooling purposes.
With demand for data centers tripling over the last decade and expected to triple over the next decade, the question becomes whether municipalities where these data centers are being constructed have the means to keep up with demand. While data centers require an immense amount of water, there are no policies requiring them to use more eco-efficient water systems, and they are not currently legally required to report their water consumption. Some local governments have signed NDAs with developers, making it even more difficult to track water usage and impacts.
Just last week, New York introduced the country’s first statewide moratorium on data centers. The moratorium will put a one-year pause on the construction of any new data center so the state can make rules protecting the environmental and energy grid needs. Although New York is the only state offering policy to hold companies that build data centers accountable, there are steps other communities can take to do the same.
Next City put together a list of guides for communities looking to protect themselves from data centers, and an overview their top findings (in case you don’t have time to read them in full).
These guides encourage municipalities to include environmental impact tracking in contracts, create community benefit agreements, know how to spot a data center developer, avoid signing NDAs, and understand how projects will impact the local workforce. They also give tools to community members who want to take action on data centers. Get into them below.
What To Ask When A Data Center Wants To Come To Town
There are many questions communities have when a data center development project comes to town. It can be hard to narrow down which ones are the top priority to get answers to. Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center, put together a guide for public officials and community members on the most important questions to ask, long before approval of a data center.
Some data center projects use LLCs and general language, making it hard to confirm that the development project is in fact a data center. This guide provides step-by-step questions on what to ask the company building the data center proposed in your town. It’s important to know data centers are not currently legally required to report their environmental consumption. To get more information about this, Good Jobs First suggests asking questions like:
- How much air pollution will the standby power generators for this project generate? How often will the back-up generators be run for testing?
- What safeguards do we have in place to ensure that residents living near data centers do not have their water supplies spoiled?
Some local governments have signed NDAs with data center developers, making it even more difficult to track water usage/impacts data centers are having. With that in mind, another one of the questions listed is: “Are there any Non-Disclosure Agreements in place? If yes, who signed those NDAs?”
AI Data Centers and Our Communities
The Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting, a community awareness initiative from environmental activist Erin Brockovich, is one of many trackers on data centers. This one stands out because it specifically tracks AI data centers instead of all kinds.
It includes a map of major AI data centers in the U.S. that are operational or under construction, in tandem with locations where community members have emailed in concerns.
The guide also compiles the latest news about data centers and tracks legislation about them.
Data Center Development Guide, from Cuyahoga County, Ohio
Cuyahoga County is home to several dozen of the hundreds of data centers in Ohio. While there isn’t much policy created to hold data center development accountable, this guide shows local actions that can be taken — from the 12 states and counting that are issuing temporary moratoriums on data center infrastructure as a means to slow down development to establishing community benefits agreements (CBA), which are a “legal tool to establish accountability and transparency between developers and community stakeholders.” It also includes a checklist of questions to ask potential data center developers.
The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers
While you have to provide your name and email in order to download this toolkit from MediaJustice, it is worth it. This 49-page toolkit, which is put together by a nonprofit dedicated to holding corporations and governments accountable for their use of media and technology, breaks down facts and falsities surrounding data centers,
The guide has a word glossary, accompanying slides in case you’re looking to present the information, and an action toolkit with step-by-step instructions on how to channel your learned knowledge into action. This toolkit is specifically targeting people looking to organize against data centers who live in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition: How Communities Can Negotiate For Local Benefit
Although Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively own 72% of all data centers and are supported by the federal administration’s July 2025 executive order to accelerate data center development, communities still have the ability to shape how these projects affect their neighborhoods and to secure meaningful local benefits.
This guide, based on a gathering with community organizations, local governments, and regional leaders organized by the Rio Grande Valley Broadband Coalition, provides residents and community organizations with a framework for drafting a Public Benefit Agreement (PBA), also known as a CBA. In a time where there are little to no federal protections for communities, this guide shows residents how to create a legally binding agreement to fill the gap left by a lack of government regulations. The guide lays out what a community can ask for related to workforce security for their locality and tax abatements. It shows residents how to ask for environmentally sustainable cooling systems, have authority in zoning parameters, and more. It even has a list of examples of where CBAs have been most helpful.
Editor’s Note: At a moment when the once vaunted model of responsible journalism is overwhelmingly the play thing of self-serving billionaires and their corporate scribes, alternatives of integrity are desperately needed, and ScheerPost is one of them. Please support our independent journalism by contributing to our online donation platform, Network for Good, or send a check to our new PO Box. We can’t thank you enough, and promise to keep bringing you this kind of vital news.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
Please share this story and help us grow our network!
