(OSV News) -- They're the new neighbor a growing number of communities across America don't seem to want -- data centers.
But what are they, and why are some people opposed to them?
The multinational technology company IBM provides this definition: "A data center is a physical room, building or facility that houses IT (Information Technology) infrastructure for building, running and delivering (digital) applications and services. It also stores and manages the data associated with those applications and services."
Which may sound harmless enough -- but opponents offer several criticisms: To build, run, deliver, store, and manage the applications and data housed in a data center, its infrastructure consumes massive amounts of electricity and water, potentially driving up local utility bills. The centers can also create industrial noise and may offer very few permanent local jobs.
A March poll by the Pew Research Center reflected Americans' growing suspicions of data centers, with respondents finding them "mostly bad" for the environment (39%); home energy costs (38%); and people's quality of life nearby (30%).
A May Gallup poll revealed 7 in 10 Americans oppose the construction of data centers in their area.
"The speed at which these things are going up -- and the drain they put on the electrical grid, and the rising cost of electricity -- because of that, people ask, 'Why do we need these in my backyard?'" said Dan Misleh, founder of Catholic Climate Covenant, a coalition of 20 national partners formed in 2006 with help from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Misleh outlined some of the issues through the lens of the Catholic Climate Covenant.
"One is the rising cost of electricity," he said. "There's a lot of communities seeing double-digit -- even triple-digit -- increases in the cost of electricity, rising over the next several years. That's primarily because some of these centers are huge, and they draw enough electricity to power up to a million homes."
Misleh continued, "There's (electrical) grid reliability, and what happens when everyday citizens who live in these communities need more electricity in the summer or winter -- and it's not available to them, because the local AI data center is gobbling up what could be used."
Community input may also be lacking, because a community was never asked for its opinion.
"A lot of these are sited in places where low-income people live," Misleh said. "They don't seem to have a say in whether or not these get sited. There's a big one Meta is putting in, in Louisiana. And that was done pretty much under cover of darkness; it began to be built without any community input whatsoever."
While noting gains of efficiency, Pope Leo XIV issued his own warnings concerning AI and data centers in the encyclical letter "Magnifica Humanitas" ("Magnificent Humanity"), released May 15.
"Current AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, significantly influencing carbon dioxide emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources," the pontiff observed. "It is essential to develop more sustainable technological solutions that reduce environmental impact and help protect our common home."
The data center boom -- fueled by surging interest in AI and appealing state tax breaks -- has propelled the construction of almost 4,000 centers, with another 3,000 projected. According to the pro-data center American Edge Project, Virginia leads among the states, with 663 operational data centers and 595 under construction or planned.
American Edge Project is primarily backed by technology companies including Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other social media apps. It recently acknowledged mounting opposition, noting in a July 16 statement, "This weekend, organizers say more than 120 protests will take place across 37 states against data centers."
However, while AEP agreed communities should "ask hard questions about big projects in their backyards" it also urged consideration of several points it asserted as true -- including the AI race should not be lost to China; data centers contribute to local economies; voters back data centers if consumers are protected; and the federal government should set regulations, not individual states.
Can a middle ground be found?
"Data centers have become a kind of unifying issue across a lot of political lines," Maria Fernanda Chavez, senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told OSV News.
Founded in 1969, the UCC is a national nonprofit of nearly 250 scientists, analysts, and policy experts.
"There's definitely momentum on both sides of the aisle -- even at the federal level -- to find the best way to protect regular folks from being deprioritized in favor of these larger, big tech interests," she shared.
Such protections could come with the implementation of a tariff structure separating residential from data center use on shared power grids, requiring data centers to generate their own power, and using clean energy instead of fossil fuels.
"There's a true cost that comes from the health impacts of having data centers powered by polluting sources of energy," said Chavez, "and climate implications that translate into real dollar amounts for people that have to deal with them."
A United Nations University report released in June noted that last year, global data centers used 448 trillion watt-hours of electricity, more than all but 10 countries of the world. That electricity use produced about 208 million tons of carbon dioxide -- a naturally occurring greenhouse gas essential for regulating Earth's temperature, an excess of which contributes to global warming. Producing that energy consumed about 1.2 trillion gallons of water.
President Donald Trump, speaking July 23 in support of the White House's "Ratepayer Protection Pledge," invoked automatic utility rate protections, while saying of data centers "you can't fight it" and that communities will "make a tremendous amount of money."
The pledge -- which was released in March and is voluntary for tech companies to abide by -- states that as demand grows, "the American people should not be footing the bill for the benefit of private companies. Instead, the data center boom should be leveraged to address affordability and benefit all American households and businesses."
So far signed by Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, OpenAI, xAI, Amazon and 23 Republican governors, the pledge has been criticized by the environmental advocacy organization Sierra Club as "a paper-thin commitment."
"Policy typically does not move at the same pace as the big tech industry," said Chavez -- which is why "we need to make sure to build safeguards into our policy development as soon as possible, to mitigate for the potential impact data centers are bringing not just to the grid, but to communities."
Opposition will likely come from AEP, which issued a solemn warning in a 2025 report: "Misguided state-level bills risk adding costly red tape, creating new legal risks, slowing innovation, all while undermining U.S. competitiveness."
In a January 2026 report, the UCC suggested "The United States can meet electricity demand from data centers primarily with clean energy and simultaneously phase down fossil fuel use" and noted that "Data centers must be required to pay a fair share of the nearly $1 trillion in electricity costs attributable to them over the next 25 years."
While the issue of data centers may seem a fresh topic in the media, "Data centers are not new," observed Ian Moise, director of the Catholic Energies Service Platform, which supports Church institutions nationwide in advancing renewable energy, storage and efficiency projects.
"It's not like there was no AI, and then all of a sudden there was AI; these kinds of capabilities have been developing for a long time," he said. "Reading documents electronically, voice detect -- all these things we take for granted in our technologies ... all emerge or result in increased computing and energy requirements."
In other words, this a new chapter in a longstanding environmental and economic struggle.
"This is old environmental justice, NIMBY stuff -- not in my backyard," Moise observed. "If you're wealthy, you don't put a data center in your backyard because it affects your property value. If you're poor, you're willing to, because it boosts your income a little -- but then you're living with this massive data center."
