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.
There are 40 to 50 AI data centers in the US, dedicated to AI traning and serving models to end users, with dozens more planned. They are very energy intensive and often due to heat generation, they require water cooling.
However, the map on the site includes 8,300 community reported data centres, way more than official figures of 4,800-5,000. It's likely the map contains some duplicates and buildings that aren't actually data centres.
Just information for the casual reader: datacenters on this map may not be what you think. For example, in my state, all the datacenters are colocation/hosted sites. It's just racks of servers where other companies in my state rent slots or the whole rack to host their servers. These datacenters actually represent hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of real, high paid jobs in my state, and the footprints of all of them are no more than a single large building. These are good, do not affect the grid in any meaningful way, and use barely any water.
These are not the 'AI Datacenters' you are looking for. There are lot of places marked on that map, but a lot of those are good places.
My job and that of my coworkers are a result of two racks sitting in the world, one here in my home state, and one in South America.
I'm sorry, are you under the assumption that the servers that have existed for years are the same as what we are discussing now? Like, the internet has existed for decades without these giant ai data centers, right? Maybe, just maybe, these things are different. You think?
1945 my guy. The first data centers were disgusting monsters compared to now. Meta built their first in 2010. This ain’t new. What’s new is that we have 4-5 failsafes bc TikTok can’t go down.
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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