Bengaluru: AI data centres are one of the biggest flashpoints in the US today. Corporations are racing to build, and communities are protesting construction. Now, one of America’s most well-known environmental activists has waded into the battle. Erin Brockovich has created a community-led map of data centres across the country.
It’s a bid to track patterns of “growth, conflict and uncertainty” surrounding centres that often come up in secret, without residents being consulted on the process.
In a Substack article last week, Brockovich asked if data centres are so great, why are they being built in secret?
“The single most common concern—more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills—is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency,” she wrote.
Her interest in the issue began when people across the country started writing to her about data centres being built in their neighbourhoods with little to no notice. Residents, she said, used the words silenced, ignored, secretive, and not seen and not heard.
“They’re watching their utility bills climb, finding sick animals they can’t explain, and worrying about the long-term impacts on their health and property values. These complaints are not small. They show a national pattern,” she wrote.
The map is a bid to visualise this national pattern.
Also read: Inside Chennai’s data centres. Fortresses of the AI era
Who is Erin Brockovich?
Brockovich shot to international fame in 2000 when Julia Roberts played her in a namesake movie about her first activism win. The film revolved around the real-life case against Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E). The company was accused of contaminating the groundwater in Hinkley, California, with chromium 6.
The direct-action lawsuit was settled in 1996 for $333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in such a case in US history at the time.
She has since been involved in multiple similar cases where corporations and even governmental organisations have been accused of environmental damage and consequent health issues.
On brockovichdatacenter.com, she lists the six main concerns against AI data centres. They are energy consumption, water usage, e-waste, location risks such as flooding, scalability and efficiency, and noise pollution.
She makes it clear that she is not indiscriminately against data centres or the technology they support. What she hopes to achieve with the map is sustainable, secure, and efficient AI data centre practices.
“Some communities have welcomed these facilities after genuine public engagement, honest disclosure of impacts, and real negotiation of community benefits. When that happens, that’s democracy working the way it should,” she writes.
Also read: One AI data centre generates more heat than 2 lakh households, US university study finds
Protests against data centres
Pro-data centre messaging focuses on job creation, tax revenue, and broadband expansion.
But according to a Gallup poll, seven in 10 Americans (71 per cent) oppose constructing AI data centres in their community. Nearly half of those (48 per cent) are strongly opposed.
Opposition to data centres is higher than the opposition to nuclear facilities. In the same poll, Gallup found that 53 per cent of Americans say they oppose building a nuclear energy plant in their area.
Last month, Heatmap reported that at least 20 proposed data centres in the US were cancelled due to local opposition in the first three months of 2026.