Is an AI Data Center Coming to Your Community? What You Deserve to Know Before It's Built

Did you know that “the cloud” isn’t actually in the sky?

WHAT?!

I know. For years I pictured it up there too. Somewhere fluffy and far away, quietly holding my photos, my emails, and my slightly embarrassing search history.

But the cloud is a place. It is a building. Often a massive, windowless, humming building that drinks electricity and water and sits on a piece of land that might be a few miles, or a few hundred feet, from someone’s bedroom window. And increasingly, that someone might be you.

Mind-blowing, right?

I recently got back from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine’s EnviroMed 2026 conference, where I heard two presentations that genuinely changed how I think about artificial intelligence. One was from environmental medicine specialist Barry Smeltzer, PA-C. The other centered on the work of Erin Brockovich, yes, that Erin Brockovich, who has been raising the alarm about how these facilities are being built. (10)

I use AI. I think it has extraordinary potential. This is not a “technology is bad” story. But as an environmental medicine physician, what I learned left me with a lot of questions I think we should all be asking. So let’s walk through them together.

The Cloud Has a Physical Footprint

Here is the thing we forget every time we say “the cloud.” All of that computing has to happen somewhere physical, and that somewhere is an AI data center: rows upon rows of servers that need buildings, electricity, water, cooling systems, and backup generators to run around the clock.

And the scale is staggering. In 2023, US data centers used about 176 terawatt-hours of electricity, roughly 4.4 percent of all the electricity in the country. Federal researchers project that could climb to somewhere between 6.7 and 12 percent by 2028. (1) That is not a rounding error. That is a nation building a second electricity habit, fast.

Then there is water. Many data centers use enormous amounts of water to keep their servers from overheating. One analysis found that a single medium-sized facility can use about as much water as three hospitals, or two eighteen-hole golf courses. (2) In a drought-prone place, that is not an abstract concern.

The strain doesn’t stop at the meter, either. In some regions, data center demand is now growing faster than the grid can keep up. A single voltage fluctuation in Northern Virginia once knocked about 60 data centers offline at the same moment, forcing emergency adjustments to keep the system stable. (9) Once you see the data center as a physical, industrial neighbor rather than a wispy cloud, the health questions start to write themselves.

Start With the Air

Let’s start with what you breathe.

Many data centers rely on diesel generators for backup power. Nationwide, there is an estimated 55 gigawatts of diesel generator capacity sitting at data centers, which is more than half the capacity of every nuclear power plant in the United States combined. (3)

Diesel exhaust is not benign. It contains fine particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, benzene, and other combustion byproducts, especially during testing or extended use. (4) These are not mystery toxicants. We have decades of research showing that fine particulate matter lodges deep in the lungs, drives inflammation, and worsens asthma, heart disease, and lung disease.

Now, in fairness, these generators are usually permitted for emergencies and testing, and companies point out that any single unit may run only a handful of hours per year. But here is the catch. Each generator is often regulated as its own small source, even though a large facility may house dozens or even hundreds of them, adding up to power-plant-level emissions on paper. (4) And when the grid is stressed and many of them fire up at once, the local air can take a real hit.

How real? One analysis of air permits for data centers in Northern Virginia estimated the region’s backup generators could trigger on the order of 14,000 asthma-related episodes a year. (5) A separate modeling study projected that, left unchecked, pollution tied to the power and generators behind data centers could contribute to hundreds of thousands of additional asthma cases and more than a thousand premature deaths annually by 2028. (5) These are projections, not certainties. But they are sobering.

So when a facility is proposed, it is fair to ask: How many back-up generators? How often will they run? And what, exactly, will be monitored? How will we compensate for the increased strain on the aging electrical grid?

Then Ask About the Water

Remember all that water used for cooling? It has to go somewhere afterward.

Depending on the facility and the cooling system, there can be real concerns about wastewater and the chemicals used in the cooling process. Some cooling fluids, fire-suppression systems, and the semiconductors inside the servers involve PFAS, the so-called “forever chemicals” that do not break down in the environment and have been linked to certain cancers, reduced fertility, and immune effects. (6)

Here is the part that unsettled me most: in many places, the water discharged from data centers is not required to be tested for PFAS at all, not by the state and not by the federal EPA. (6) So when residents ask what is in the water leaving the facility, the honest answer is often that nobody is measuring. That is not reassuring. That is a huge blind spot.

The reasonable questions here are simple. Where is the water coming from? And where is it going afterward? What quality measures can we expect to be put in place?  Who has jurisdiction over the water quality?

Don’t Forget What You Can’t See

Some of the biggest quality-of-life impacts are the ones that never show up in a photo.

Data centers run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and that constant operation creates continuous low-frequency noise from cooling systems, fans, and generators, plus nighttime light pollution from facilities that never go dark. (7)

Low-frequency noise is sneaky. It travels far, penetrates walls, and is hard to capture on a standard sound meter, which makes it hard to regulate, yet your nervous system still registers it all night long. Neighbors of data centers have reported headaches, vertigo, nausea, ear pain, elevated blood pressure, and above all, disrupted sleep. (7) The World Health Organization treats environmental noise as a genuine health exposure, linking chronic nighttime noise to sleep disruption, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease. (7)

Add all-night lighting, which suppresses melatonin and scrambles the body’s circadian rhythm, and you have two round-the-clock exposures that quietly chip away at the one thing your body needs most in order to heal: sleep. (8)

Environmental health is about more than one chemical at a time.

The Part That Really Bothers Me

And that phrase, more than one chemical at a time, is exactly the heart of it.

In environmental medicine, we talk about total load, or cumulative load. The idea is that your body is not reacting to a single villain in isolation. It is carrying the combined weight of everything at once: the air, the water, the noise, the light, the stress. Any one of these exposures might be tolerable on its own. Stacked together, day after day, they can push a body past its threshold.

Here is what genuinely concerns me as a physician. We are building this infrastructure faster than we are studying what it means to live next to it. We do not yet have decades of epidemiological data on the communities surrounding AI data centers, in part because so many of them are brand new. (5) We also don’t know the consequences for the impact on the land itself or the animals that live on the land either.  Some of these facilities are being built in rural areas, so what about the farm land, the wild animals, not to mention the people and their way of life.

Fortunately, we already have substantial research on many of the individual exposures involved: fine particulate matter, PFAS, certain VOCs, chronic environmental noise, and nighttime light. We do not need to wait twenty years to know that these things affect human health, or the health of the animals and wildlife nearby.  We already know. What we do not yet fully understand is what happens when a community lives with all of them, together, over time.

To be fair, data centers also bring real economic benefits, and the digital infrastructure they support is not going away. The goal is not to pretend otherwise. The goal is to make sure we are measuring the costs as carefully as we are counting the benefits.

We shouldn’t have to wait decades to start asking better questions.

Who Feels It First

And some people feel these exposures long before others do. Children, older adults, pregnant women, and people already living with asthma, cardiovascular disease, or complex chronic illness tend to have less reserve to absorb a new layer of environmental stress. If your body is already working hard to manage inflammation, an added burden of air, water, noise, and light exposure is not a small thing. It is one more stream filling an already full bucket.

The Transparency Problem

Now for the issue that may matter most of all, because it determines whether you get any say in the others.

Transparency.

This is where Erin Brockovich comes in. After decades fighting for communities harmed by industrial contamination, she has turned her attention to data centers and has collected thousands of reports from residents across every state. The single most common complaint is not noise, or water, or utility bills. It is that people had no idea the facility was coming until construction was already underway. (10)

Part of the problem is that some of these deals are negotiated with local officials under non-disclosure agreements, which can mean a community does not even know a data center is being proposed until the decisions are essentially made. (10) As Brockovich has pointed out, if these projects are as harmless as promised, the secrecy is hard to explain.

To be clear, and she says this too, this is not an argument against AI, or against every data center. It is an argument that residents deserve meaningful disclosure and a genuine opportunity to participate in decisions that may affect their air, their water, and their neighborhoods. Communities should know before construction begins, not after.

The Questions to Ask if a Data Center Is Proposed Near You

So what do you actually do with all of this? You get informed, and you get specific. If a data center is proposed near you, here are the questions worth asking, out loud and on the record.

1. What will it use? Ask how much electricity and water the facility will require, where that water will come from, and what it will do to local utility rates and supply.
2. What will it release? Ask about air emissions from the backup generators and about wastewater, including whether the discharge will be tested for PFAS and other chemicals, and how often.
3. How many generators, and how often will they run? Ask what type they are, how many hours they are permitted to operate, and what happens during a prolonged grid event.
4. What will be monitored, and by whom? Ask specifically about ongoing air, water, and noise monitoring, who conducts it, and whether the results will be made public.
5. What about noise and light? Ask for a low-frequency noise assessment and a plan to limit nighttime light, not just a single decibel reading taken at the property line.
6. And most importantly, when does the community get a say? Ask when public hearings will happen, whether any agreements have been signed under non-disclosure, and how residents can weigh in before, not after, the decisions are made.

You do not need a science degree to ask these questions. You just need to ask them early.

This Isn’t About Stopping Technology

I want to conclude where Erin Brockovich and I agree, and where I hope you land too.

This isn’t about stopping technology. I see the extraordinary potential of AI, and I use it myself. It is about making sure innovation doesn’t move faster than our willingness to protect human health.

We can ask for better. Clean air. Clean water. Transparency. Accountability. And a seat at the table when decisions are being made about our own communities.

Because the cloud, it turns out, is not floating harmlessly overhead. It has a physical footprint, and we need to pay attention to where it lands.

At The Spring Center, environmental medicine is the lens through which we help people understand how the world around them, the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the total load their bodies carry, shapes how they feel. If you are navigating complex, environmentally influenced symptoms, or you simply want to understand your own exposures more clearly, we are here to help you make sense of it.

The more I learn about AI data centers, the more questions I think we should all be asking. Let’s start by asking them out loud.

Resources

1. U.S. Department of Energy. DOE Releases New Report Evaluating Increase in Electricity Demand from Data Centers (2024 LBNL report; 176 TWh, about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023, projected 6.7 to 12% by 2028). https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers
2. Shehabi A, et al. 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/2024-lbnl-data-center-energy-usage-report
3. Environmental Law Institute. Data Centers and Water Fact Sheet (January 2026). https://www.eli.org/sites/default/files/files-pdf/Data%20Centers%20and%20Water%20Fact%20Sheet%20ELI%20January%202026%20(1).pdf
4. “Living in Hell”: Data Center Neighbors Grapple With Noise, Air Pollution. U.S. News & World Report. https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-28/living-in-hell-data-center-neighbors-grapple-with-noise-air-pollution
5. Environment America. False Emergencies, Real Pollution (estimated 55 GW of diesel generator capacity at U.S. data centers). https://environmentamerica.org/center/resources/false-emergencies-real-pollution/
6. Physicians for Social Responsibility. Hyperscale Data Centers: Pollution, Power, and Health. https://psr.org/issues/environment-health/data-centers/
7. Health-Informed Computing: Estimating and Addressing the Public Health Impact of Data Centers (Caltech and UC Riverside modeling study). https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.06288
8. In Virginia, concerns about pollution from data centers and their diesel-powered generators (analysis of Northern Virginia air permits). The Winchester Star. https://www.winchesterstar.com/in-virginia-concerns-about-pollution-from-data-centers-and-their-diesel-powered-generators/article_b6e70506-a22a-5638-8059-6a51bbcc0d94.html
9. As AI Data Centers Expand, New Cooling Chemicals Raise PFAS Concerns. WRAL. https://www.wral.com/news/local/as-ai-data-centers-expand-new-cooling-chemicals-raise-pfas-concerns-august-2026/
10. What’s in the Water? What We Know and Don’t Know About Data Center Water Discharge in Virginia. Virginia Mercury. https://virginiamercury.com/2026/06/01/whats-in-the-water-what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-data-center-water-discharge-in-virginia/
11. Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Communities Are Raising Noise Pollution Concerns About Data Centers (summarizes WHO environmental noise findings; reported neighbor symptoms). https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-noise-pollution-concernsabout-data-centers
12. The Dangers of Data Centers. Environmental Health Project. https://www.environmentalhealthproject.org/post/the-dangers-of-data-centers
13.   Neighborhood Light at Night and Noise Levels, and Long-Term Sleep Trajectories. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11036205/
14. AI, Data Centers, and the U.S. Electric Grid: A Watershed Moment. Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School. https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/ai-data-centers-us-electric-grid
15. Erin Brockovich Takes Aim at Data Center Secrecy. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/31/erin-brockovich-takes-aim-at-data-center-secrecy/
16. Erin Brockovich Explains Why She Started Mapping AI Data Center Concerns. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/erin-brockovich-explains-why-she-started-mapping-new-ai-data-center-concerns-12220566
17. Brockovich Data Center Reporting (community concern map). https://www.brockovichdatacenter.com/