While local lawmakers and the Trump administration are trying to encourage more data center construction to support the AI boom, people in places with lots of the computer-filled facilities offered a warning on Wednesday.
At an event organized by Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey, environmental advocates from Indiana, Virginia, Tennessee, and other states said data centers had driven up the cost of electricity for consumers and increased air and water pollution.
Earlier on Wednesday, the Trump administration unveiled three executive orders designed to encourage the development of artificial intelligence and data centers, in part by suspending environmental reviews.
“Data centers are extremely power hungry and can put local communities’ air quality at risk,” said Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney in Tennessee for the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Elon Musk’s xAI recently built a huge data center in Memphis with its own gas-turbine power generators. The company “essentially set up a power plant without any permits or input from the affected communities,” Garcia said.
At the White House, the Trump administration released a 28-page report dubbed “America’s AI Action Plan” that said the country had to build more data centers to win a global race for AI dominance. The tech industry has already undertaken a massive building boom to support the growing use of AI applications, spending hundreds of billions of dollars building new data centers.
“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it,” the report said. “To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day. Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”
In Virginia, which has more data centers than any other state, the growing need for electricity to power the facilities is pushing up utility rates for everyone, Julie Bolthouse, director of land use for the Piedmont Environmental Council, said. That’s because all customers share the cost of adding new power stations and transmission lines. (Grid operator PJM Interconnection, which serves Virginia and a dozen other states, had to pay power generators 22 percent more at an annual capacity auction on Tuesday due in part to growing demand from data centers.)
“We know that the customers, the utility customers that are not data centers, are going to be subsidizing the electrical infrastructure for the richest companies in the world,” Bolthouse said.
Massachusetts has largely been left out of the boom, owing to land and electricity costs that are among the highest in the country.
But last year’s economic development legislation exempted data centers from “sales and use” taxes in an effort to attract more of the facilities to the state. And a potential $3 billion data center has been discussed and could be built near the Westfield-Barnes Regional Airport, about 15 miles west of Springfield.
Markey acknowledged the importance of building data centers to support AI, but said the effort needs to take into account local concerns and protect the environment.
“AI has the potential to offer real public benefits ... but those benefits cannot come at the unchecked expense of our environment and our health,” Markey said at Wednesday’s event.
He also criticized the Trump administration for cutting subsidies for solar and wind power. Big tech companies had been supporting such projects to power their data centers. “Our environment doesn’t have to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of innovation, Markey said. “We can have green growth.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.