How Data Center Fights are Renewing Local Power Across the US | Climate Week NYC | Data & Society with the Pulitzer Center (Retro Report)

To hear many in the tech industry tell it, data centers will bring wealth and prosperity not only to those who build them, but to the communities that ultimately live with and around them. But drawing a longer historical arc is essential: AI is proposed as a new industrial moonshot in communities that have already seen the rise and fall of steel factories, coal plants, fracking infrastructure, and more. Today’s companies are trying to sell communities on yet another industrial vision.

This time, those communities are raising concerns about some of data centers’ more visible impacts, including their intensive use of resources, while contending with a host of unknowns related to environmental costs, quality of life, and the future. In the face of yet another generation of rapid corporate development and promises of trickle-down benefits, community members and activists across political lines are not sitting on the sidelines. They are organizing and engaging fellow residents, media, and government to demand their say in how data centers operate and impact the places they live.

The event was anchored by the launch of Data & Society’s report, The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania, a landmark study emerging out of eighteen months of field research in the Keystone State, as well as Pulitzer Center-supported reporting on data center development by The Texas Tribune.