The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented data center buildout that has especially hit rural communities living near ample empty land where tech companies see fit to plop down these megastructures.
Some residents of Ohio, a state that hosts the fifth-highest number of data centers in the U.S., have been advocating to stop the spread of these AI data centers into their local communities. And they are using AI to do this.
That’s according to a recent profile of two Ohioans in the Wall Street Journal. Social worker Jessica Sharp uses generative AI tools to transcribe meeting minutes with fellow activists and understand how to conduct legal research, all in the hopes of combating a giant data center complex that is being built just yards away from her backyard, where she is raising her 18-month-old daughter.
“I’m going to use every tool in my arsenal to respond,” Sharp told the WSJ. “They’ve had a multiyear lead time on this, and I’m just going to try to catch up.”
Elsewhere in the same state, near the Appalachian Mountains, realtor Jessica Baker uses ChatGPT to write records requests to fight against a data center planned in her community.
“It’s threatening our way of life: we move slower out here, we appreciate the view out here, and we don’t want that to change if it’s not going to benefit the people who live here,” Baker said.
The situation does seem a bit ironic, but only at first glance.
The United States has been engaged in an unprecedented data center buildout to accommodate the skyrocketing compute demand expected from the gradual increase in the use of artificial intelligence. So every time someone relies on artificial intelligence chatbots to get something done, it only increases the burden on existing infrastructure and underscores the need for more.
But new reports and studies detailing the impact data centers are having on local communities have sparked local opposition to any newly announced project, and the opposition might have some legitimate concerns. Studies have shown rising utility bills and above-average air pollution for people who live near a data center.
A new pre-print study also claims that data centers create heat islands within a 6-mile radius, akin to heat islands seen in city centers, and have been linked to health problems. Changing temperatures in the vicinity of data centers would also be especially detrimental to agriculture, which rural communities, where a lot of these data centers are being built, rely on. An Amazon data center planned in Sharp’s town, for example, is being built on vacant farmland, and the activist said she has concerns over the data center’s impact on her family’s future health.
Numerous others are standing against the data center buildout because they are worried about the impact artificial intelligence will have on the fabric of society. Critics are worried about rising mental health problems that are allegedly linked to increased AI usage, AI acceleration of warfare and mass surveillance, or an AI-driven job market armageddon that some claim is already underway.
Some of this opposition has translated to actual change, with data center cancellations due to local pushback quadrupling last year.
Elsewhere, the pushback has turned violent. Last week, a local Indiana politician’s home was shot at 13 times in the middle of the night, and the assailants allegedly left a note that said “no data centers.” The politician is pushing for the construction of a data center in his district. A few days later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco was hit by a molotov cocktail.
But not all of this pushback against the rapid data center proliferation is necessarily anti-AI. Most of the negative health and economic effects of data centers could be adequately addressed with more research and stricter regulations. For the heat island effect study, for example, the researchers concluded that advancements in software design and hardware could help resolve the issue.
A similar thing could be said of AI’s impact on society. Cornell associate professor of global labor John McCarthy told Gizmodo last year that AI’s adverse impact on the labor market could be addressed effectively if “policy, education, and hiring norms adjust.” The only problem is that the technology is advancing too rapidly to give everyone else enough time to catch up.
A significant part of the national advocacy against the data center buildout is centered around calls for a moratorium, aka a temporary ban on data center project developments, until the effects of AI and the data centers that power it have on local communities, the economy, and the environment are understood. Right now, the technology is evolving so rapidly in an incredibly underregulated environment in the United States that science and policy are having a hard time catching up with it. The thinking goes that, if given the time to truly understand the impact of data centers, then the government can introduce some guardrails to ensure the responsible development of AI.
Some local communities have already begun drawing up plans for city or state-level moratoriums on data centers, and on Tuesday, Maine became the first state to adopt a statewide moratorium that will pause large data center projects until October 2027. The Maine bill passed the state legislature on Tuesday evening and is now awaiting the approval of Governor Janet Mills.
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