Since the release of the 2000 Oscar-winning movie about her, the name Erin Brockovich has been synonymous with grassroots activism against powerful institutions. This year, Brockovich has turned her attention to a new target: AI data centers. When Brockovich asked people online how they felt about the issue, she received a “flood” of impassioned responses, she wrote in May.
So Brockovich launched a tool to map data centers across the country, allowing community members to submit their own information about nearby data centers. That map has since received more than 9,000 reports and has become a repository for information, including about data centers’ energy usage, physical size, and economic impact. The site also tracks local legislative and community efforts to push back. (Similar efforts include the Data Center Proposal Tracker and Data Center Watch.) While Brockovich has elevated all kinds of concerns, she herself is particularly concerned about data centers’ lack of transparency and public participation.
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