Community opposition to data center development has become a hot-button bipartisan issue, and citizens and politicians are demanding more information from would-be developers and their customers about potential impacts to electricity prices, water supplies and other natural resources.
Businesses must treat those concerns and questions seriously if they want to retain their social license to operate in this moment of spiking energy demand and rapid deployment of artificial intelligence services and the infrastructure to support them, said former Obama administration official and Tennessee Valley Authority board member Michelle Moore during an energy tutorial on June 23, at Trellis Impact 26 in San Francisco.
Seven in 10 U.S. residents have serious concerns about how to make sure their voices are heard on data center build-outs in their communities, noted Moore, whose energy nonprofit Groundswell brings community solar and energy efficiency programs to rural communities, citing recent Gallup research. That sentiment is bipartisan, uniting citizens who don’t see eye-to-eye on many other issues.
“There is one thing they agree on,” said Moore. “They don’t like data centers.”
A groundswell of opposition
Growing community opposition to big data centers came up frequently during the Trellis Impact keynote program on Tuesday: Several speakers urged corporate sustainability professionals to ask tougher questions of their AI suppliers as part of contract discussions.
“We currently have the people driving this ecosystem not in the room, not at the table,” said Dara O’Rourke, an environmental scientist and professor at the University of California Berkeley, calling out AI companies including Open AI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and Mistral. “We really need all of you in the room to use your power to reach the good version of this.”
That pressure should be applied to the modelers, the data center providers, chip designers and utilities, O’Rourke said. In particular, the sustainability community should push back on the addition of natural gas generation to the U.S. grid — as Microsoft, for example, plans for several proposed data center projects despite its aggressive 2030 emissions reduction goal.
The Business Council on Climate Change, which represents companies including Google, LinkedIn, Pacific Gas & Electric and Salesforce this week published suggested questions that companies should ask their data center suppliers, including greenhouse gas emissions across all three emissions scopes defined by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, energy consumption in megawatt-hours associated with training an AI model, and both direct and indirect water usage related to electricity consumption.
“If we do our jobs as the community’s customers, then these firms I listed at the start will actually have to hire you,” O’Rourke said. “They will actually need you on their teams doing this work and driving this forward in a serious way.”
