How Data Center Fights are Renewing Local Power Across the US

To hear many in the tech industry tell it, data centers will bring wealth and prosperity not only to those who build them, but to the communities that ultimately live with and around them. But drawing a longer historical arc is essential: AI is proposed as a new industrial moonshot in communities that have already seen the rise and fall of steel factories, coal plants, fracking infrastructure, and more. Today’s companies are trying to sell communities on yet another industrial vision. This time, those communities are raising concerns about some of data centers’ more visible impacts, including their intensive use of resources, while contending with a host of unknowns related to environmental costs, quality of life, and the future. In the face of yet another generation of rapid corporate development and promises of trickle-down benefits, community members and activists across political lines are not sitting on the sidelines. They are organizing and engaging fellow residents, media, and government to demand their say in how data centers operate and impact the places they live. On September 22 in a discussion moderated by Kit R. Roane, senior producer at Retro Report, Maia Woluchem, program director of Data & Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures program;Alejandra Martinez, The Texas Tribune environmental reporter and Pulitzer Center grantee;Brian Crawford, Texas resident with the non-profit Protect the Paluxy Valley;and Ginny Marcille-Kerslake, Pennsylvania resident and Senior Organizer, Food & Water Watch, will discuss what the facts on the ground might mean for the future. The event is anchored by the launch of Data & Society’s forthcoming report, The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania, a landmark study emerging out of eighteen months of field research in the Keystone State, as well as Pulitzer Center-supported reporting on data center development by The Texas Tribune. This panel is co-organized by Data & Society, Retro Report, and The Pulitzer Center.