Overview
- Erin Brockovich’s crowdsourced map has collected thousands of community reports of operational, under‑construction and proposed AI data centers, creating a national catalogue that activists and residents use to flag local water, noise and transparency concerns.
- Texas grid operator ERCOT is formalizing a batch interconnection process to screen speculative projects and require financial or site-readiness commitments before studying requests to connect large loads to the grid.
- North Carolina lawmakers are advancing Senate Bill 730 to force large data centers to cover incremental generation and transmission costs, ban local incentives, tighten siting and ownership rules, and require closed‑loop water cooling systems.
- Wall Street and policy analyses warn power demand from data centers could more than double in the near term, with forecasts projecting U.S. data‑center demand rising toward 66 gigawatts by 2027 and models showing higher wholesale and retail prices if new generation and transmission lag.
- Major tech firms stress technical fixes and renewable deals — including closed‑loop cooling, power‑purchase agreements and community investments — but critics say those promises leave open how much new clean capacity is actually added and who ultimately pays higher bills and bears environmental impacts.