Imagine waking up to the sharp smell of diesel exhaust drifting through your window while you watch your community’s river run low but not from drought, but from the massive water demands of nearby data centers. It sounds dystopian, yet this is the daily reality unfolding in suburbs and rural towns across the United States.
Data centers have long relied on freshwater for cooling, but the AI boom has escalated that demand. In 2025, data centers consumed hundreds of billions of gallons of water for cooling and power generation. Developers are now tapping local rivers, aquifers, and municipal supplies at unprecedented rates to satisfy the thirst of data centers, putting the communities that host them at risk. Data center operations still rely heavily on fossil fuels, emitting air pollutants and fine particulates that raise serious public health risks, especially asthma. Meanwhile, chemical runoff from cooling systems contaminates soil and waterways.
These facilities create real environmental challenges and are too often sited and strategically chosen in already vulnerable places. As AI demand surges, the need for more facilities will only grow.
Case Studies: Three Data Centers and the Pollution Protests They Sparked
Protests, town hall shouting matches, lawsuits, and petitions are now routine responses to new data-center projects. Communities simply do not want these facilities in their backyards because of the pollution burden they bring. The three examples highlighted below (from the South, the West Coast, and the Midwest), show the distinct harms of these facilities in overburdened, vulnerable, neighborhoods with a high percentage of People of Color. Together, they show how data center expansion repeatedly reproduces environmental injustice.
Amazon’s Canton Facility, Mississippi (Operational Since Late 2025)
In Canton, a majority Black town long marked by underinvestment, Amazon opened a $10 billion AI data center that promised 1,000 jobs. Yet within months, residents began reporting lung irritation, breathing difficulties, and construction dust that settled over homes and playgrounds. Cooling towers pull millions of gallons of water daily from the already-stressed Big Black River system, while weekly tests of backup diesel generators spike local NOx levels and worsen the area’s elevated childhood asthma rates. “We were promised prosperity, but got poisoned air and vanishing water,” said local activist Maria Gonzalez. Community outrage led to a class-action lawsuit filed in February 2026 alleging Clean Water Act violations; expansions have been halted pending independent audits.
Monterey Park Data Center, California (Halted Construction, February 2026)
Near Los Angeles, residents protested a proposed 1.2-million-square-foot hyperscale facility by EdgeCore. This facility had the potential to increase fine particulate exposure and cancer risks, according to local modeling. California’s chronic water scarcity made the projected 500 million gallons of annual demand especially alarming for the already over abused and used San Gabriel Valley aquifers. E-waste estimates added another layer: the site could generate thousands of tons of obsolete servers every few years, raising fears of lead and mercury leaching into landfills. After more than 3,000 petition signatures and powerful testimony from farmworkers about crop-damaging runoff, the city council revoked permits in February 2026 and halted the expansion “This isn’t innovation; it’s environmental colonialism on our doorstep,” declared the lead organizer Mei Lin with the No Data Center Monterey Park coalition.
Stargate Project, Saline Township, Michigan (Permitted 2025, Ongoing Delays into 2026)
South of Ann Arbor, the $7 billion Stargate venture, a product of OpenAI and Oracle, promised a tech renaissance when it gained approval in fall 2025. Instead, it targeted and capitalized on a regulatory loophole that would allow unchecked emissions from natural gas turbines, potentially adding 1.5 million tons of CO₂ per year. Water withdrawals of roughly 1.8 billion gallons annually from the Huron River basin threaten wetlands and riparian ecosystems. In January 2026, more than 200 residents stormed township meetings, successfully delaying Phase II until stricter emissions caps are enforced. “Our soil’s turning toxic, our river’s running dry—all for someone else’s cloud storage,” said resident Kathryn Haushalter.
These battles reveal a clear pattern of environmental injustice: pollution hotspots cluster in overburdened communities where the promise of jobs and economic prosperity rarely offsets the loss of clean air, clean water, and peace of mind.
Mitigation Strategies in the Queue for 2026
After years of petitions and protests, developers are finally incorporating more sustainable designs, even though critics question whether these measures are sufficient enough. In Virginia, Dominion Energy’s planned 25 gigawatts of solar and wind by 2035 will help power new facilities with far lower fossil-fuel dependence and water use through advanced air-cooled systems that recycle 95 % of vapor. Microsoft’s Chicago’s development, rolling out in phases from mid-2026, is piloting immersion cooling and other efficiencies projected to cut chemical runoff by 30 %. Similar innovations (i.e closed loop cooling, on-site renewables), are appearing in projects nationwide. These innovations could begin to ease the disastrous environmental issues associated with data centers.
Conclusion
Data centers advance us into an intelligent future, yet their pollution footprint is causing real, measurable harm to millions of people and places. As both a student and a resident of a city already negotiating its own energy future, I believe we can, and must, do better. True progress will require transparent water accounting, binding emissions limits, equitable siting policies, and the political will to prioritize people over unchecked expansion.
Reader Question
How could the UChicago community push for real accountability in our own cloud dependencies? Could a campus-wide sustainability audit of our vendors be a first step?