The Top 10 Reasons Data Centers Must be Stopped

Food & Water Watch
Published Mar 4, 2026

While AI data centers enrich the Big Tech elite, our water, climate, and communities pay the price.
Nationwide, Big Tech has set its sights on thousands of communities to bear the brunt of its newest trillion-dollar obsession — data centers, predominantly to power its artificial intelligence (AI) technology. But while AI and data centers are funneling unimaginable wealth to Big Tech billionaires, they’re shoving all the risks, downsides, and damages of this technology onto us. They must be stopped. Read more about the Urgent Case Against Data Centers in our latest research report.

Data centers and AI are driving higher energy bills, more climate chaos, dwindling water supplies, and much more. Based on the latest research, here are the top 10 worst ways data centers leech off our communities and the planet for Big Tech’s profit.

1. Data Centers Raise Energy Demand and Electricity Bills

Data centers demand massive amounts of energy to do their work. And they’re only getting more energy hungry as Big Tech corporations embed digital technologies even further in our daily lives. The AI boom requires an especially large amount of computing power, which translates to more energy use.

“Hyperscale” data centers housing AI servers, or massive computers, can consume five times more energy than pre-AI data centers. A single hyperscale AI data center can consume as much energy as 100,000 households, and the largest as much as 2 million. This increased demand and infrastructure have been linked to skyrocketing energy prices across the country.

2. Data Centers Are Propping Up Gas, Coal, and Nuclear

The U.S. AI boom is largely fueled by dirty energy, which means more climate and health harms in our communities. Already, data center expansion is extending the lives of dirty gas and coal-fired power plants, while driving new gas power development. At the same time, Big Tech is reviving risky nuclear energy to power its data centers, including with projects in Pennsylvania and Iowa.

Big Tech needs dirty energy corporations to power its data center expansion just as much as dirty energy corporations need Big Tech to justify the continued burning of fossil fuels. This terrible alliance means more toxic pollution and more climate-wrecking emissions.

3. Data Centers Are Endangering Our Water Supplies

Data centers also use massive amounts of water for cooling their servers, which run super-hot. We estimate that by 2028, U.S. data center water needs (just for cooling) could be as high as the indoor needs of 18.5 million U.S. households.

Nevertheless, despite these water needs, roughly two-thirds of data centers built since 2022 are in water-stressed regions, raising concerns of worsening water scarcity problems. One Georgia county reported that taps ran dry after Meta began building a data center.

Data centers also have implications for our water bills: in that same Georgia county, water rates will rise by 33% in two years, compared to the typical 2% annual increase.

But direct cooling isn’t the only way data centers drain water supplies. Nearly three-quarters of a data center’s water use comes from generating electricity. And that footprint is several hundreds of times higher for cooling processes powered by fossil fuels and nuclear compared to renewables.

4. Data Centers Are Creating More Air Pollution

Many data centers use backup diesel generators to account for power outages and to take pressure off the electricity grid during times of peak demand. These generators are especially dirty, emitting massive amounts of harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides. Nitrogen oxides and other air pollutants from diesel generators exacerbate childhood asthma cases and elderly cognitive decline.

Moreover, some developers are building fracked gas infrastructure for the sole purpose of powering data centers, which come with their own air pollution risks.

In a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood of Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus data center reportedly spews thousands of tons of nitrogen oxides annually from 35 on-site gas turbines. Levels of nitrogen dioxide pollution, associated with cancer, rose by nearly 80% near the site. Memphis residents already suffer cancer rates four times the national average.

5. Data Centers Are Draining Public Funds

Data centers introduce a host of environmental and health harms, and yet states are forgoing many millions of dollars in tax revenue to entice Big Tech to set up shop.

At the same time, the federal government may shell out billions to prop up the AI data center boom. In August 2025, the Trump administration pledged an $8.9 billion investment in Intel stock to expand U.S. manufacturing of semiconductors (a key component in computers). Meanwhile, OpenAI is calling on Trump for support to finance its growth.

6. Data Centers Are Threatening Our Jobs

Despite what data center developers claim, this industry does not provide significant jobs to the local community. After construction, even the largest data centers typically employ fewer than 150 permanent workers.

And these jobs don’t come cheap. We found that in Virginia, a data center job created in the last five years required $54 million in investment. That’s 168 times more than the average job in the state.

Meanwhile, the artificial intelligence that data centers power is threatening to destabilize entire industries. In October 2025, Amazon eliminated 14,000 positions to invest more in AI. Other companies like Salesforce, Duolingo, and Lufthansa have made similar moves. For some AI companies, this is a feature, not a bug of their technology. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even boasted that AI can already replace entry-level workers.

7. Data Centers Are a Blight on Communities

The long and disruptive construction periods for data centers are wreaking havoc on many communities, leading to longer commute times, increased traffic accidents, and closed playgrounds.

After a data center is built, it continues to harm the quality of life of its neighbors. Local communities have compared the constant buzzing of data centers and their cooling systems to lawn mowers running 24 hours a day, which even closed windows don’t shut out.

These facilities are sprawling eyesores that gobble up land. A proposed expansion of Meta’s data center in Louisiana would reportedly increase its footprint to nearly the size of Manhattan.

8. The Data Center Boom Is Imperiling the Entire Economy

The AI boom is propped up on the precarious stilts of monumental debt, speculation, and financial trickery. The way things are going, Big Tech may even plunge us into an economy-wide meltdown like the dot-com crash of the 2000s or the 2008 financial crisis.

AI companies are already hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. Their massive infrastructure buildout is funded by promises of profits that have yet to materialize. And they’re using all sorts of arcane financial tools (including ones tied to other financial crises) to borrow more and more and more, creating a bubble that may pop at any moment.

And just as Washington bailed out the banks after 2008, we could be on the hook to bail out Big Tech if this bubble bursts.

9. Data Centers Create Toxic Trash Dumped on Other Countries

The servers, chips, and other computing components inside data centers are destined for the trash in just a handful of years. Meanwhile, global electronic waste (e-waste) recycling systems are not even close to catching up to this new glut of trash. Less than 25% of e-waste gets recycled globally.

Already, high-income countries have made a habit of dumping their e-waste on developing ones for “disposal.” The workers and communities receiving this waste are routinely exposed to heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium, which are linked to a host of health harms, from neurodevelopmental impairments to cancer.

10. AI Devours Our Sensitive Personal Data

The generative AI tools driving much of the data center boom are basically massive prediction machines. They’re “trained” to respond to a question or request based on what they “learn” from scanning vast treasure troves of information. This has led to massive data scraping efforts from AI companies.

Any public information not behind a paywall may be devoured by AI companies, including voter registration data, social media profiles, passport photos, and even credit card numbers. Some AI tools have even been trained on private medical records and leaked or hacked materials.

Companies also use data from their own sites — like Google searches, Facebook and Instagram shares, and Amazon purchases — to train their AI. Without regulation protecting our data, much of this scraping is entirely out of our control.

It’s Time to Stop Big Tech’s Data Centers!

The AI boom has driven the wealth and power of Big Tech to new heights. The stock value of these corporations has skyrocketed. In 2025, the top five companies in the S&P 500 were all tech giants at the forefront of AI expansion. Seven of the top 10 richest people on the planet are U.S. tech leaders, with wealth in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Yet, people across the country are refusing to bend to Big Tech’s power. They see data center expansion for what it is: a ploy for profits that harms the rest of us. Now, a grassroots movement is fighting — and winning — to stop these facilities in their tracks.

By one count, as of March 2025, local activism have delayed or blocked around $64 billion-worth of U.S. data center projects. States are starting to catch up, introducing new laws to curtail the industry. In February, New York lawmakers introduced a bill to stop data center construction statewide, the strongest bill of its kind in the country.

Our leaders cannot allow Big Tech billionaires to continue exploiting us for their own gain. We need to stop all new data centers, nationwide, until we have a regulatory framework that protects our communities and the environment.

https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/03/04/comprehensive-report-lays-out-case-for-nationwide-halt-on-new-data-centers/

“Across the country, communities are forced to protect themselves against a rapidly expanding, unchecked data center industry, often with little to no information about the developments proposed in their own backyards,” said Yvonne Taylor, Vice President of Seneca Lake Guardian. “What we do know is that these facilities consume extraordinary amounts of electricity and pose severe risks to our water and air quality. This report sheds a critical light on the scale of this industry’s impacts and gives communities the information they need to demand transparency and strong protections that put public health and clean environments over corporate profit.”