Something strange is happening in small towns across America. Residents in places like Sulphur Springs, Texas, and Marshall, Michigan, are waking up to the rumble of construction equipment on land they thought they knew — and discovering, often for the first time, that a massive AI data center is going up next door. No town hall vote. No ballot measure. In many cases, not even a heads-up from the city council. The deals, frequently protected by non-disclosure agreements, were done before anyone thought to ask the neighbors.
Enter Erin Brockovich. If that name sounds familiar, it should — she’s the environmental advocate whose fight against Pacific Gas & Electric over chromium-6 contamination in Hinkley, California, ended in a $333 million settlement in 1996 and became the Oscar-winning film starring Julia Roberts. In a fate only Hollywood could write, a sequel to the acclaimed film could easily be in the works for the next Academy Awards ceremony.
Thirty years later, Erin Brockovich is back on familiar ground: communities, water, and big companies that would prefer not to answer questions. Speaking recently on Theo Von’s podcast This Past Weekend, Brockovich described how it started: “I woke up one morning and I had 30 emails … from the same community regarding the same issues — data centers.” When her own research hit walls, she did what she does best — she made a map.
That map, at BrockovichDataCenter.com, lets residents self-report data center projects and concerns in their communities. Within 72 hours of launch, it crashed twice under the traffic. “I woke up on day three going, oh my God, it’s not one town and one aquifer and one data center, it’s the entire country,” she said. As of early July 2026, the map holds more than 8,100 community reports from all 50 states, spanning over 2,200 zip codes. And her map is only the citizen-facing half of the picture: industry trackers like Baxtel’s global data center map catalog more than 8,000 facilities worldwide — operational, under construction, planned, and everything in between.
[The following is an interview that Anthropic’s Claude AI created about the situation and the data center controversy. I wanted to get a feel for what the responses would be like for this discussion.]
So what’s actually going on here? Why are these facilities multiplying so fast, why do communities so often find out last, and how worried should we be? I sat down with myself — educator hat firmly on — to work through the questions I keep hearing.
Q [Claude] : Let’s start simple. What is an AI data center, and why are so many being built right now?
A [Claude]: A data center is a warehouse full of computer servers. What’s changed is scale. Training and running AI models takes enormous computing power, so companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI are racing to build “hyperscale” campuses — facilities that can sprawl across hundreds or thousands of acres and draw as much electricity as a mid-sized city. The AI race is a land grab, and the land being grabbed is often rural: cheap acreage, available power, and — crucially — local governments eager for tax revenue.
Q: Why do they end up in small towns instead of big cities?
A: Follow the resources. These facilities need three things in bulk: land, electricity, and usually water for cooling. Rural counties have all three, plus something else developers love — speed. A small county commission can approve a rezoning in weeks. Add generous tax abatements and utility deals negotiated behind closed doors, and you get the pattern Brockovich’s map reveals: Texas leads her report tally by a wide margin, followed by Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana — not Silicon Valley.
Q: The claim that communities don’t get to vote — is that true?
A: In most cases, yes, and it’s not technically illegal. Data center approvals typically run through zoning boards and county commissions, not ballot referendums. If the land is already zoned industrial, there may be no public process at all. Layer on the NDAs — officials sometimes sign confidentiality agreements during negotiations, and projects advance under code names — and residents can be legally kept in the dark until the bulldozers arrive. As Brockovich put it, recounting what communities tell her: “They had no idea. They woke up to this construction. We weren’t informed. City council didn’t tell us anything.” Her site’s own data backs this up: zoning and process complaints and NDA/secrecy concerns together show up in hundreds of submissions.
Q: What are people most worried about?
A: Water, by a landslide. In the keyword analysis on Brockovich’s statistics page, water appears in about 41% of reports — nearly double the next category, electricity and the grid at 22%. Then come health concerns, wildlife and land use, and noise. That last one surprises people: the constant hum of cooling fans, generators, and substations is a genuine quality-of-life issue for anyone living near a facility that never sleeps.
Q: How bad is the environmental footprint, really?
A: It depends heavily on the facility and the region, which is part of the problem — there’s no single answer, and companies aren’t always forthcoming with numbers. But the broad strokes: a large data center campus can demand hundreds of megawatts to over a gigawatt of power, and evaporative cooling systems can consume millions of gallons of water on hot days. In water-stressed regions, that’s a direct competition with farms and households drawing from the same aquifer. There’s also electronic waste — servers are replaced on fast upgrade cycles — and grid strain that can show up on everyone’s utility bill. To be fair, the industry points to real benefits too: construction jobs, tax revenue, and investments in local infrastructure. Some communities genuinely want these projects. The issue Brockovich raises isn’t “data centers are always evil” — it’s that residents deserve the information to weigh those trade-offs before the deal is signed.
Q: Is this actually changing anything politically?
A: More than you might expect, and it doesn’t follow party lines. In June 2026, Utah’s Senate president, Stuart Adams, lost his primary in a race The Hill tied directly to data center backlash. Maine has moved toward a moratorium on new AI data centers over grid concerns. The New York Times has reported on liberals and conservatives finding common cause against projects, and on a Montana rancher fighting a 5,000-acre facility. When a rancher, a suburban parent, and an environmental activist all show up at the same county meeting, elected officials notice.
Q: Why does the Brockovich connection matter? Isn’t this just celebrity activism?
A: Here’s why the history matters: Hinkley was also a story about a big company, a small town, and information asymmetry. Residents got sick for years before anyone connected the dots to chromium-6 in the groundwater, because the entity with the data had no incentive to share it. The parallel to data centers isn’t contamination — at least not yet — it’s the secrecy. Brockovich’s core method hasn’t changed in thirty years: collect what residents know, put it on a map, and make the pattern impossible to ignore. Whether you find her map alarming or overblown, it’s doing something the industry hasn’t — making the footprint of the AI boom visible in one place.
Q: What should someone do if a data center is proposed near them?
A: Three things. First, get informed: check Baxtel’s map for announced projects near you, and read your county’s zoning agenda — projects often hide there under bland names. Second, ask specific questions in public: Where will the water come from? Who pays for grid upgrades? What are the noise limits, and who enforces them? What tax abatements were granted, and for how long? Vague opposition is easy to dismiss; specific questions on the record are not. Third, document and report — Brockovich’s site takes community submissions with photos, and that collective record is what turns one town’s complaint into a national dataset.
Q: Last question. Is the AI boom worth it?
A: That’s the question nobody gets to skip, and I won’t pretend there’s a tidy answer. AI infrastructure is being built either way — the competition, both commercial and geopolitical, guarantees it. The real question is narrower and more local: who bears the costs, who reaps the benefits, and who gets a say? Right now those three groups barely overlap. Maps like Brockovich’s won’t resolve that imbalance by themselves. But you can’t fix what you can’t see — and for the first time, we can see it.
Sources: Newsweek — Erin Brockovich Explains Why She Started Mapping New Data Center Concerns · BrockovichDataCenter.com · Community Report Statistics · Baxtel Global Data Center Map