The stream that coursed over Maily Kocinski’s Wisconsin family farm for 47 years dried up after construction began on Meta’s AI data center in nearby Beaver Dam. When it returned, it ran murky white. The state’s natural resources department left her repeated requests for help unanswered. Private testing found heavy metals in the stream, and Kocinski urged lawmakers to pass protections. A bill proposed to protect Wisconsin ratepayers and the energy grid passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate.
Residents like Kocinski, and people across the country, deserve protection for their water and their air. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency alarmingly announced in June it won’t set national standards for AI data centers, even as we don’t yet have a full picture of air or water impacts (let alone what will happen to our utility bills). The bad news arrives as 1,500 new data centers are being developed nationwide, with the majority in rural areas, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.
A 2026 study by the Environment and Energy Study Institute — a bipartisan congressional nonprofit group founded by Congress — states AI data centers are contributing to PFAS contamination, or forever chemicals. Servers, semiconductors, cooling systems, and fire suppressants can all contain PFAS. A United Nations report states that pollution and energy use will double in four years as AI expands.
History is easy to forget. Federal environmental protection laws prior to 1970 were all gums, no teeth. In 1970, Congress passed a stronger version of past efforts with the Clean Air Act; the same year, the EPA was born. The Clean Water Act followed in 1972. Alarming photos preserved in the National Archives at the dawn of these reforms reveal toxic sludge, Uranium-tained water, and neighborhoods choked by smog. When Nixon tried to veto the Clean Water Act, Congress overrode him. Can you imagine such united action today?
A laughable opinion piece published July 25 by The New York Times claims arguments against AI data centers “are shakier than they seem.” Not only are the arguments too dumb to warrant further ink, they raise serious questions about editorial standards. The first-person experiences and data reveal an opposite truth.
If Bob Ross could paint the picture, he wouldn’t depict happy little trees, but neighborhoods choked by smog and creeks similar to Kocinsky’s flowing white heavy metal milkshake.
The Vantage Data Center in Loudoun County, Virginia, uses on-site gas turbines for power in one of the world’s densest data center corridors. Researchers estimated air pollution-related health damages would cost between $53 million and $99 million annually — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date. The researchers believe the air pollution would lead to an estimated 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths per year across the affected region, alongside increased hospital admissions, asthma-related outcomes, and lost productivity.
Further South, in Mississippi, dozens of unpermitted gas turbines power the xAI’s Colossus 2 data center and release smog-forming pollution, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.
In Memphis, 35 unpermitted temporary gas turbines are exacerbating the health issues of an area already crushed by decades of pollution, according to environmentalists. Neighbors say asthma is worse and that they can literally smell the choking stench in the air.
All of us — even Washington politicians — love a person for whom clean air can be a life-or-death prospect. A child with asthma. An aging parent with COPD. Walking through cigarette smoke can trigger a breathing emergency for people like my 13-year-old son, who has the genetic illness cystic fibrosis.
For those public officials unmoved by facts, know this: come fall, you’ll all fry on your AI data center altars.
At community forums across the nation, the staunchest MAGA supporters and tea party loyalists are joining hands with self-professing “Democratic socialists” — and every political stripe in between. They’re crying out for transparency, accountability, and protections for their communities’ natural resources.
Why sprint toward dystopia blindfolded, through smog, off a cliff into a pit of toxic sludge? We’ve got options.
REPUBLICANS ARE ABOUT TO LET DEMOCRATS STEAL A WINNING ISSUE
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) ordered a first-in-nation AI data center moratorium in her state. There is room for bipartisanship federally: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act to enact a reasonable pause on the development of AI to ensure the safety of humanity. Before you laugh, note stranger things have happened: The bipartisan, bicameral strange bedfellow Hawley-Warren PBM reform bill — the Patients Before Monopolies Act targets conflicts of interest created when large healthcare companies own both pharmacy benefit managers and pharmacies.
The president and Congress must empower the EPA to do its job. This ripe federal bipartisan policy opportunity can’t wait. It’s not a political football. Kocinsky deserves transparency, accountability, and protection from her elected officials. We all do.
Juliana Keeping founded Keeping Strategies LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy communications firm specializing in moving evidence-based bipartisan reform at scale. Prior to founding her firm, she testified before Congress in the lead-up to landmark federal reform to lower drug prices and healthcare costs before supporting its rollout at the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services. Juliana is a healthcare consumer and media expert quoted in Forbes, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous publications throughout the country.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
