If Data Centers Are So Great, Why Are They Being Built in Secret?

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If Data Centers Are So Great, Why Are They Being Built in Secret?<br>We Have A Transparency Problem When It Comes To Data Center Construction

Erin Brockovich and Suzanne Boothby<br>May 27, 2026

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Photo by Nick Windsor on Unsplash<br>I have spent my career listening to the people, especially those who were told to sit down and be quiet, who were told their backyard was safe, and that the water was safe to drink….<br>I’ve shown up to community after community across the country for decades because the people who live in these towns invite me. I get hundreds of emails every single day, and what they say boils down to two little words: help me.<br>So when I started hearing from people about AI data centers appearing in their communities with little to no notice, I paid attention.<br>On April 27, I put out a simple ask: if you have concerns about an AI data center near you, tell me about it. I expected some response. What I got was a flood.<br>We started with 30 reports on the map at BrockovichDataCenter.com. In a month, 3,862 residents submitted reports. The map now has 2,716 pins and represents 49 states. 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 .<br>Residents are using words like silenced, ignored, secretive, and not seen and not heard.<br>They write about back-door deals and NDAs. They describe showing up to planning meetings only to find out the decisions have already been made.<br>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.

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When you hear about issues in one community here or there, it looks bad. But when you line these communities up side by side, you see the larger picture.<br>So let me ask the question directly: if AI data centers are such a tremendous benefit to communities, why are so many of them being built without meaningful community input?

The Scale of What’s Being Built

To understand what communities are dealing with, you first have to understand the scale of what is being constructed, and how fast it’s all happening.<br>I’m not talking about a handful of buildings going up quietly in industrial zones. What we’re seeing is a wholesale remaking of the American landscape, town by town, county by county.<br>In the flatlands of northeast Louisiana, know for soybean fields and dense clusters of rivercane, Meta is building a 4-million-square-foot AI campus called Hyperion. When finished, it will consume more electricity than the entire city of New Orleans and cover a footprint the size of lower Manhattan.<br>“Meta’s investment establishes the region as an anchor in Louisiana’s rapidly expanding tech sector, revitalizes one of our state’s beautiful rural areas and creates opportunities for Louisiana workers to fill high-paying jobs of the future,” said Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry in a press statement. “I thank Meta for their commitment to our state.”<br>Diane Cobb, a resident of Holly Ridge an unincorporated community in Richland Parish, said she found out about the data center the way everyone else in her community did—when they started digging.<br>“Nobody told us anything,” she told New Orleans Public Radio. “They supposedly had a big meeting. The whole community was supposed to come. Nobody knew anything about it. Ever.”

At a meeting at Diane’s house in February, local community members brought their questions.<br>Why does their water sometimes turns brown?<br>Why has their electricity has been shutting off without any notice, sometimes for days at a time?<br>Why does everyone seem to have gotten sicker since Meta showed up?

In West Memphis, Arkansas, Alphabet’s Google has started construction on what state officials are calling the largest private capital investment in state history, a multibillion dollar campus on 1,100 acres of scrubland.<br>In South Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk converted a vacant Electrolux factory into his Colossus supercomputer in just 122 days. He is now building a second, larger version targeting a million GPUs, has acquired a third building to expand further, and purchased a former Duke Energy power plant to keep it all running.

A New Polluting Factory Outside Memphis? It's A Supercomputer.<br>Erin Brockovich and Suzanne Boothby<br>June 4, 2025

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Microsoft has invested more than $7 billion in its data centers in Racine County, Wisconsin.<br>“In the heart of the American Midwest, a modern marvel is rising,” Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement. “We’re in the final phases of building the world’s most powerful AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin—part of a region forged by generations of hard work and ingenuity.”<br>Meanwhile,...