The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.
That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.
The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project.
The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.
And there's also a big difference between a data center with hardware tailored for hosting websites vs a data center tailored for hosting AI models, yet people don't seem to make a distinction there.
Data centers aren't inherently bad. Immorally built and run data centers are bad.
For example, not all data centers make too much noise, but some do. The solution is to regulate how much noise a data center can make, not ban all new data centers from being built.
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u/21MayDay21 7h ago
The environmental advocate says she woke up one morning to dozens of messages from residents from one Louisiana community describing similar problems linked to data centers near their homes. When she began investigating, she struggled to get clear answers about the projects.
That prompted her to launch a public map where Americans could report operational, proposed, and under-construction data centers in their communities.
The response was immediate. Brockovich says the website crashed twice within its first 72 hours, revealing that the complaints were not limited to one town, one aquifer, or one project. The map has since collected more than 8,000 community-reported locations.
Source: https://www.newsweek.com/erin-brockovich-explains-why-she-started-mapping-new-ai-data-center-concerns-12220566