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Last night, the Memphis City Council voted 7-5 to postpone its final vote on a 12-month pause on new data center approvals until October 20. It's the second time the council has delayed this vote. More than 100 residents came to City Hall, and the decision set off protests in the chamber, a fistfight in the lobby and a heated exchange between council members (Action News 5). The pause would give the city time to study data centers' impact and write rules for them before approving more.
In 2024, xAI opened its first data center, "Colossus," in an old factory near Boxtown, a predominantly Black neighborhood in South Memphis with about 3,000 residents (Blavity). The company ran up to 35 turbines there without permits (SELC). After the facility opened in June 2024, researchers at the University of Tennessee found that nitrogen dioxide levels around the site rose 79% (Blavity). And this is a community that already faces cancer rates four times the national average and leads the state in emergency room visits for asthma (Time).
A data center is a giant building full of computers that store our files and run the AI tools we use, like chatbots and image generators. Those computers run all day and get very hot, so they need huge amounts of electricity to keep going and water to cool them down – about two liters of water for every kilowatt hour of power they use (MIT News).
There are about 3,000 data centers operating across the country, and another 1,000 in the works. About 1,200 of them are in the South. In Bessemer, Alabama, a proposed $15 billion data center called Project Marvel would use nearly 2 million gallons of water a day and clear 700 acres of forest. Residents in South Fulton, Georgia, a predominantly Black city, are fighting a wave of new projects that they believe threaten both their physical and financial well-being (Capital B).
In July, the nonprofit Front and Centered released the first study of its kind on where Washington State's data centers are built. It found that more than half of the data centers it studied sit in the census tracts with the highest share of people of color. In Grant County, where 45% of residents are Hispanic, data centers now use 37% of the county's energy (Inside Climate News).
And data centers drive up to 70% of new energy demand in some towns, and electricity costs near some of these sites have risen as much as 267% since 2020 (Capital B). In states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, households are already seeing higher electricity bills as these projects grow (Consumer Federation of America). Those costs land hardest on families who were already struggling to keep the lights on.
Data centers keep landing in these neighborhoods for a few reasons. They need cheap land, cheap power and a lot of water. And they need local officials willing to approve them quickly, often with little information shared with the people who live nearby. "If this was really good for the community, why all the secrecy?" asked Benard Simelton of the Alabama NAACP (Capital B). Communities that were redlined and zoned for industry are already overburdened with pollution, which makes them the hardest places to defend.
We've seen this before. In 1982, North Carolina chose Warren County, a majority Black rural county, as the dumping ground for soil laced with toxic PCBs, and the protests that followed helped start the environmental justice movement (Facing South). Since then, the same story has played out in Louisiana's "Cancer Alley" (Human Rights Watch), in Flint (Great Lakes Now) and in Uniontown, Alabama (Canary Media). Data centers are the newest version of an old decision about whose neighborhoods are worth protecting. Communities from Memphis to Bessemer are asking for honest disclosure, real permits and a say in what gets built, and we should be asking with them.
Sources: MIT News, SELC, Blavity, Time, Capital B, Inside Climate News, Consumer Federation of America, Facing South, Human Rights Watch, Great Lakes Now, Canary Media.
