Erin Brockovich takes aim at data center secrecy

Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has a new mission: Bringing more transparency to data center construction and the impact those data centers have on nearby communities.

Brockovich — who was famously played by Julia Roberts in a film dramatizing her legal case against Pacific Gas & Electric — recently launched a website with a map of data centers across the United States.

The website describes the map as “work in progress” that includes data centers reported by members of the surrounding community. In a Substack post, Brockovich said that after putting out a call for reports of data center-related issues in April, she received nearly 4,000 submissions in the first month alone.

“The single most common concern — more than noise, more than water usage, more than rising utility bills — is the one word that keeps appearing in submission after submission: transparency,” she wrote.

Brockovich added that she’s not making a “making a blanket argument against data centers” or AI, but rather against “the pattern our map documents: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don’t return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.”