The woman who took on Pacific Gas & Electric and won a $333 million judgment for a small California town three decades ago says she has found her next battleground — and it is spreading faster than anyone expected. Erin Brockovich, the legendary environmental campaigner whose fight against corporate pollution became a Hollywood blockbuster, is now warning that the explosive growth of AI data centres across the United States is quietly reshaping communities, driving up household costs, and threatening water and energy supplies on a scale few politicians are prepared to address.
Her words carry weight. And right now, she says, people are listening.
A Familiar Fight, A New Enemy
It began, as so many crusades do, with a handful of desperate emails. This spring, residents of a small county in Pennsylvania flooded Brockovich’s inbox with concerns about the sudden arrival of a large AI data centre in their neighbourhood. The message was unmistakable: something was changing, fast, and no one had been told.
Data centres — vast warehouses packed with powerful computers that keep everything from film streaming to online banking running — already number more than 4,000 across the United States, the highest concentration on Earth. The United Kingdom and Germany follow, each with over 500. But the pace of new construction has surged beyond anything local authorities anticipated, and the consequences are beginning to bite.
Brockovich, 66, says the pattern in Pennsylvania was tragically familiar. “It’s the same thing all over again,” she told The Independent. “Except this time, the scale is different. This time, it’s everywhere.”
The Map That Lit a Fuse
Within days of reading those Pennsylvania emails, Brockovich and her team had built a digital map tracking data centres across the country. The response was staggering. Within 72 hours, complaints had arrived from every single US state. That number has since expanded to include a dozen countries.
The Brockovich Data Center Map now catalogues more than 9,200 complaints tied to 112 already operating data centres, 143 currently under construction, and 128 more at the proposal stage. Texas leads the nation in complaints, followed by Ohio and Virginia — all states where the build-out has been particularly aggressive.
“What they all have in common is the secrecy, the lack of transparency to people about what is going on,” Brockovich said. “People’s water bills are going up. Their electricity bills are going up. Even their property bills are going up. They are changing zoning laws. Some people say local councils are trying to claim their property by eminent domain to lay transmission wires and cables.”
The numbers tell only part of the story. Behind each data point is a community grappling with the tangible effects of rapid industrial expansion — higher utility costs, strained water supplies, and a sense of being sidelined by decisions made in boardrooms hundreds of miles away.
A Bipartisan Backlash
What makes this moment politically significant is the breadth of the backlash. Brockovich describes the anger as “bipartisan” and “bordering on the unprecedented.” With the US midterm elections for Congress looming in November, the data centre issue has the potential to reshape races in both parties.
“It’s bipartisan. It affects everybody,” she said. “Politics is definitely going to be involved.”
The pressure is already yielding results. More than 500 moratoriums on new data centre construction are now in force across the country. Among the most prominent is one declared by New York state governor Kathy Hochul. Yet the pushback is not without cost. Brockovich says several city councils attempting to pause projects have been hit with multimillion-dollar lawsuits from the technology companies behind them — a tactic she says is designed to intimidate.
“That makes it even harder for them to stand up,” she added.
Brockovich is careful to draw a distinction. She insists she has nothing against artificial intelligence. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said, acknowledging that she even uses AI tools herself to extract information from technology firms that otherwise refuse to comment on their intentions. Her grievance is not with the technology itself, but with the breakneck speed at which it is being deployed and the absence of meaningful community consultation.
“I don’t understand what the sudden rush is,” she said. “It’s as if these companies believe there is some sort of window that is going to close.”
The comparison to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s is apt, observers say. Then, as now, investors poured money into speculative ventures with little regard for long-term consequences. And then, as now, there are fears that a spectacular bust may follow if the promised profits fail to materialise.
Meanwhile, the environmental toll grows. Many data centres are being constructed in drought-restricted regions, intensifying pressure on already scarce water reserves. Rather than investing in renewable energy, a growing number of tech giants — from OpenAI to Meta, Google, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX — are turning to natural gas to power their operations, drawn by its lower cost and greater accessibility at a time when the climate crisis demands the opposite.
Brockovich argues that the issue could finally make climate change resonate with voters who have long found the term abstract. “For many people, climate change and global warming have always been vague terms,” she says. “That’s why they probably never resonated in national politics before. But the data centres are bringing it to life for everybody.”
Her goal, she says, is simple: get companies and local governments to pause, assess, and plan. “The stakes are too high for all of us,” she adds. “People are mad enough. Maybe data centres are what unites us after all.”
Why It Matters
The rise of the data centre is not merely an industrial story — it is a civic one. These facilities consume enormous quantities of energy and water, often in regions least equipped to spare them, and their proliferation is already pushing up costs for ordinary households and small businesses. With hundreds of moratoriums in place and a dozen countries now voicing objections, the signs are clear that public tolerance for unchecked expansion has reached its limit. What happens next will shape not only the environmental footprint of the AI revolution but also the political landscape heading into the midterm elections. Communities are no longer willing to be bystanders, and the fight over data centres may prove to be the defining environmental battle of this decade.
