How a Powerful Coalition is Pushing Back Against Data Centers

FEATURING THOMAS MEYER - One year ago, President Donald Trump’s White House released a document on the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) titled, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan.” Trump’s plan directly incorporated recommendations from the Data Center Coalition, an industry group representing the Big Tech companies profiting off AI and generating an unquenchable thirst for data centers around the United States - large warehouses filled with constantly humming computer servers capable of processing the data that AI requires. 

Push back from the public, from organizers, and even from the Pope, has been fierce as it becomes apparent that data centers are sucking up huge amounts of land and water resources, fueling pollution, and generating heat in an already warming climate. A new coalition of diverse advocacy groups has emerged against this rapidly expanding industry, the Stop Data Centers Coalition.

Thomas Meyer is the Deputy Political Director at Food & Water Watch. Based in Seattle, Washington, he works with organizers, volunteers, and coalition partners across the country to develop campaign strategies and build grassroots power. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the Stop Data Centers Coalition.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: I summarized the problems with data centers, and I think most people, even if they like the idea of AI or using it or even support the idea of data centers, don't necessarily want to live next to one. How do you summarize or give us a greater sense of why they're so bad, why they are so terrible for people, for the environment? 

Thomas Meyer: Well, you're exactly right that most people don't want to live near data centers. There has been an extraordinary shift in public opinion over the last even just few months. Recent polls have between 70% and 80% of people across the US saying that they don't want a data center in their community, and that's up from 30%, 40%, 50% just six or eight months ago. 

The problems are varied, for sure. You mentioned land and water and electricity. Those are, I think, at the top of mind for most people. The water usage comes from the need to cool the huge arrays of computers and processors. But actually, most of the water usage is related to the electricity demand. So most electricity in the country, especially fossil fuel-produced electricity, really runs on heating up huge quantities of water to power a turbine and create electricity that way. 

And so water being used to make power from coal or increasingly fracked gas is part of the life cycle of the power that is required at these data centers. And you're seeing a lot of data centers actually being proposed or being built with diesel or gas or coal electricity generation on-site. They're so big, and they require so much power that they're actually putting small power plants or large arrays of diesel generators, in some cases, right there on-site. 

So all those things together contribute, of course, to more pollution. If it's on-site, it's where the data center is, people are living with, or it's driving pollution in other parts of the state or in the region where power plants are being built or kind of restarted if they had recently closed down.