• Data centers strain water supplies. A large data center can consume 5 billion gallons a day. That's roughly the same amount of water a small town of 50,000 uses.

• Noise pollution is a frequent complaint by people who live near data centers. "Chronic exposure causes sleep disturbance, headache, hearing loss, elevated stress hormone levels, hypertension, anxiety, and even cardiovascular risks." Noise also disrupts wildlife, causing alterations to their communication, behavior, and migration patterns.

• Generative AI may produce as much as 5 million tons of e-waste annually according to a 2024 study.

• Within the next year, a single 1GW data center may release 350 million gallons of wastewater per year, but " if we scale up power consumption in these data centers by two orders of magnitude at the same WUE (i.e. 100 GW clusters), only 30 of these data centers will release the equivalent of all wastewater released in the US annually."

• Natural gas will be used to power all but two proposed data centers in Pennsylvania. All of the adverse impacts experienced by those who live and work here over the past two decades will continue.

• Natural gas production adversely affects the climate, but so does the astronomical amount of energy used by the data centers themselves. Analysis from MIT Technology Review concluded that electricity used in data centers is "48% more carbon-intensive than the U.S. average." 

• PennState says that it's hard to know how much water data centers use because they're typically not required to report it, among other reasons.

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• Inside Climate News recently reported that "many Pennsylvanians saw their electricity rates increase between 5 and 12 percent–and some as much as 40 percent–according to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission." Virginia, the state hardest hit by data centers, with 666 dotting the state, experienced a 13% increase in electricity prices in the 12 months ending in August. 

• AI is threatening jobs, as we've noted elsewhere. Among the companies whose executives are quoted above, three of them have operations in PA. According to the PA Department of Labor and Industry, two of them, Walmart (#3) and Amazon (#5) are among the top 10. The third is IBM (#529).

• Carbon Direct notes that ratepayers will be left holding the bag if data centers become stranded assets. "Once built, ratepayers will have to continue paying for these long-lived investments for years, even if they are underutilized or retired early due to policy shifts."

• Artificial Intelligence and the data centers that support them are riddled with unknowns that remain unexplored and knowns that are ignored as the public and private sectors race to get their feet in the door of this new industry. This leap-before-you-look carelessness has important ethical implications.

• Data centers that rely on incomprehensible amounts of fossil fuel-based energy and water will exacerbate the already intensifying climate crisis.

• Communities whose harms from the adverse impacts of fossil fuel extraction, production, transmission, and distribution have never been addressed will continue to be harmed.

• Data centers are too frequently placed in regions that are already experiencing water scarcity. The New York Times wrote about it in "Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door."

• According to McKinsey, African American workers would be  disproportionately affected by AI-related job cuts as they occupy the jobs most likely to be replaced first. 

• Inadequate attention has been given to the health impacts data centers can cause. Wastewater from an Amazon data center in Oregon has been linked to rare cancers and miscarriages. Data centers are contributing to PFAS pollution. Diesel generators can emit up to 600 times the Nitrous Oxide (NoX) than a natural gas power plant does, adversely affecting the local population..​

• AI, the technology at the heart of data centers, poses a wide range of ethical concerns, including privacy, transparency, accountability, and bias. ​​